Chapter Text
It was some time in December. At least, I think it was December since there was brown-tinted snow covering the tarmac as I walked along the yellow lines on the side of the road.
The streetlamps seemed keen on going out that night, flickering faintly like small fireflies. I wished that streetlamps were still lit with fire so that I could see what it would be like to have the roads lit up by tiny stars. I kicked the rocks at my feet and looked down at my half-black trainers, revelling in the way the rocks I kicked seemed to beckon me to follow them as they rolled no more than a foot in front of me.
I’d have said I felt tired, but I wasn’t really sure what I was feeling. I guess I could say I felt cold, and it wouldn’t be a lie unlike any of the other feelings because it was cold on that night. Frost painted my cheeks a light pink, but I couldn’t see it and it wasn’t like the people driving in the cars next to me could see it either. The only evidence I had was the fact that I could feel the skin beneath my eyes burning. Most of my skin felt like it was burning, actually.
I kind of thought I was alive, if the concept of being alive was feeling any small sliver of ordinance in your own life. To me it was. And at that point, that was all that seemed to matter anyway.
I say all this to prolong telling you what happened after I did all this mind-wandering and body-wandering and looking at people’s cars and trying to tell if the people driving them looked like the faces you can make out with the grilles and headlights of their vehicles.
The rock I was kicking hit something solid. I say solid not as in hard, but as in something substantially soft that seemed to be lying on the side of the road. I had neglected to look up from my feet until I stopped perhaps a couple centimetres away from the obstruction. A furry, grey body was silhouetted by the streetlamp protruding out of the ground twenty-five feet away.
I’d seen dead animals before. Squirrels mostly, a raccoon, a couple cats clawing their way to the curb. Most of the dead animals I’d seen had been left in the middle of the road like some kind of disregarded murder scene. I always wondered why people didn’t stop and stay when they hit an animal, but when seeing the dead body in front of me, I didn’t think I’d want to stay and look at whatever life I had just ended: accident or not.
I could make out that the animal was a dog – mainly due to its small snout and long legs that seemed to fold on top of each other. It was pretty big, aside from the fact that I didn’t know how big dogs were supposed to be. Its fur was matted with blood, and I would’ve felt sick if it weren’t for the fact that the blood seemed to mix in with the snow to make a kind of pretty pink.
I thought about every time I’d ever seen a dog die – mostly in movies, admittedly. Of course, they never really showed you the dog’s body afterwards, so I had no way to measure the severity of the dog’s condition. In the movies I watched, it was really more about the dogs being killed rather than the fact that they were killed in the first place.
Dogs killed with shovels, dogs shot with guns, dogs run over and left for dead on the side of the road. Sometimes they were beaten to death with someone’s bare hands or killed in staged dogfights. The list of deaths felt endless, really.
The point was, they never seemed to show what happened after that. Only the fact that everyone was sad because of it, but I didn’t really feel sad.
And aside from in movies, I’d only ever seen a dog die once.
I was possibly ten years old, and I’d never had a dog before but a lot of people I knew had one. My neighbour was one of those people. My neighbour’s dog was very big and fluffy and would always leave little hairs all over my clothes when we left to go home. I don’t remember his name. To me, he was just the neighbour’s dog.
We were sat in the living room, and everyone was chattering and talking about things that a ten-year-old me couldn’t be bothered to care about. The neighbour’s dog had its head rested on my feet and was making a small panting noise as though he’d run a mile instead of just walking down the steps and sitting down next to me.
I was mindlessly looking at the wall when I felt someone grip my hand tightly. I had only just realised that the room had gone very quiet and that everyone seemed to be holding their breath.
The person next to me whispered that it was time to go home and so I shuffled my feet out from under the neighbour's dog and patted him on the head gently.
A week later I found out that the dog had died while lying on my feet.
Everyone said that it was good thing that the dog had died. That he was old and couldn’t do anything anymore. My parents even said that there was a special heaven for dogs, which seemed stupid because I didn’t even believe in heaven.
I always thought that you should hold a funeral for a pet, but that wasn’t what happened. The dog was cremated (which according to my parents back then, is when they turn something into ashes). They put it into a small pot on top the mantelpiece in their living room. I cried when I first saw it and kept complaining because the dog wouldn’t like it in there, it’s too small for him, you have to get him out.
We moved house a year later. I still wonder whether or not my neighbours got a new dog or if they stayed content with the ashes in their living room.
The dog on the side of the road didn’t do anything when I touched it. I even scratched it behind the ears because that’s how my friend woke up her dogs. It still didn’t do anything.
I didn’t really know what to do. Who was I meant to call? When a person dies, you call a mortuary or a funeral service, but I didn’t think those things existed for dogs.
An idea came to mind. I knelt down in the snow next to the dog and lifted its head up to feel for a collar. My hand touched a small, metal oval attached to a strip of fabric.
Ace
01632 960342
No. 15, St. George’s rd
I rummaged for the phone in my pocket, the screen lighting up half-dead. I put the number in carefully and held the phone up to my cold ear.
I called four times. No one picked up.
It made sense, really. It was the middle of the night and neither me nor the dog should have probably been out there.
I gave up and stuffed the phone back into my pocket. I didn’t have much better to do, so I sat on the side of the road next to the dog and waited.
It really was stupid of me to wait outside in the freezing weather until someone came and found the dog, but I didn’t want to leave it alone, and I didn’t want to be alone either. In the cold, I could almost imagine that the dog was still warm and something inside it was still beating.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke up with my head on something soft and someone’s hand shaking me by the shoulder a little too harshly.
A man in a yellow and white jacket with a black vest was saying something to me. He seemed frustrated with my silence, so he simply lifted me up off of the soft surface and put me on the seat of an open car. I kept staring at the dog.
The side of my head I was lying on was slightly warm and had a horrible slimy feeling to it.
The man picked up the dog on the road and put it in the back of his car before kneeling in front of me.
He told me to call my parents after I’d told him I felt fine; actually, I am a bit hungry. I called my parents with my phone on speaker.
I never found out what the man did with the dog. I just assumed that he went to the address on the dog’s collar and handed them their dead pet. Of course, my parents wanted to know where I was and I told them most of it – that I’d found a dead dog on the side of the road, and I didn’t want to leave it alone.
I wondered if the dog got a funeral or if they just cremated him. Maybe they buried him in their garden and gave him a little gravestone – I thought that would be nice.
***
It was sometime in April. I say this because I knew for a fact it was April and because I could feel a sliver of sun burning up the back of my neck while a breeze blew the hair out of my face. I hated April, really.
I was in the same place, except it was in the late afternoon. The streetlamps weren’t on yet and neither were the headlights on people’s cars. However, it was still dark enough for me to rely on the luminescence of the yellow lines to see where I was going.
I was walking until I wasn’t walking and instead stood over a grey mass of fur. It let out a small whine and shuffled with arduous effort. I didn’t know what I was feeling, I never seemed to know but I still knelt down and patted the dog anyway.
It was young; I could tell by then. It was also incredibly skinny and had a red liquid oozing from its side.
It was pathetic, really. Kind of pitiful but in a useless way.
I sat down carefully on the curb and brought my knees up to my chest. I didn’t bother calling anyone – I could now tell when an animal was beyond saving. I didn’t check for a collar either, preferring to save myself from knowing its name, or knowing if it didn’t have one.
I rubbed behind its ears, watching it continue to drag itself away from the road. I gave it one last rub on its neck and felt it slump against my leg.
It was April and it wasn’t snowing anymore and that was the second time I’d seen a dead dog by the road. It was April and nothing had really changed aside from the fact that the dog was alive at first.
And I was always tired, and I was always snowing, and I was sometimes sunny and always never the same. I was still holding the dog when it died.
It was December until it wasn’t. It was April until it wasn’t. It was a movie until it wasn’t. The dog was alive until it wasn’t. I was alive until I wasn’t.
I hope you understand; I just don’t want to be a dog anymore.