The house was bright as a foreign star and utterly pristine. The dog was an appendage to this cleanliness. He was washed outside the house once a week. There was also a cat, but her cleanliness belonged to her. Every day she brought it upon herself. She never left the house, so she couldn’t be truly dirty. The dog, being of the world, wasn’t allowed to touch the house. These were the ordinances of the owner, who was good, and who drove the order of the universe ahead of her like a steady plow.
The dog tried to keep within the lines of the law, but he faced three heavy blindnesses. First, he was a dog and therefore blundering and forgetful, even when the commandments and their borders were clear before him. Second, he was emotional and used his hairy, slobbering body to emote. Third, he didn’t know he was a dog. He assumed he was a large cat, as he couldn’t see further than his snout and paws, nor could he recognize himself in the mirror.
A machine dribbled out dark pieces of meat, and the ringing sound of the bowl marked increments of time. Between the tolls, there was hunger. The dog gobbled, sloughing off his tendency toward decency and regard for maintaining a certain air. When the sickness welled up inside him, the pebbles fell out of his mouth full-sized. He stared at the way they looked, untouched, yet surrounded by his insides. Each time, the dog tried to repair the offense of eating with eating, but the owner yanked and was loud, especially when he returned again to the vomit.
The dog watched the owner pace the living room and pull at her face in the mirror. Her loneliness filled the house, steamed the windows. It was a loneliness the dog couldn’t touch. She locked him in the windowless room with the lights off when she wanted to be alone. His time outside the room was awkward, a tension that always tipped towards spill, drip, crack, slam, click, black. The dog was a piece of furniture that always had to move, with no clear purpose or function.
The house was spacious with walls a certain white that made them look light as bedsheets. The glass doors to the patio were often open. The edge of the patio was the dog’s boundary. He laid down on the tile’s end and looked out into the field of leaving. He could go missing, he thought, and the owner would possess a new tragedy, a to-do, then grow content until she once again began daydreaming the image of a dog dark and still inside the consistency of tile.
Despite this, the dog stayed, wanting to right wrong. To unstain the carpet, to start a new morning of correct and exact routine, to make a happiness out of moments of happiness. The dog’s tongue hung out like wet laundry, and he rolled it back in. He had many goals in this life, and if he stayed in the clean house, he could accomplish them, and there would be freedom thereafter. The air was tangled now with upset. It had to be made simple like when she ran her hands through his fur and her fingers disappeared.
In the house, the dog was possessed by a unique determination to be loved, whereas in the world, everyone loved him inherently. Good was a state of being he remembered, an equilibrium achieved through specific gestures, and once again he would achieve it.
The house began decreasing. Furniture vanished. The white widened over everything like mold. The food machine disappeared. The dog woke to his usual meal in a lonesome simple bowl. He looked at it for a long time, wishing to have seen with his own eyes his owner’s hands replenish the food for the first time. Light arrived on hidden dust and then the dust left also. The house felt like a fridge purged and chemically erased. The cat was carried out in a box that didn’t match the furniture. The owner only addressed the dog with her hands full. He never knew his name, though it hung from his neck, never differentiated it from the sounds of instruction.
Then she was gone, and the dog lived alone. A man with a key filled his bowl, but it carried no emotional significance. The man pet him and opened the glass doors. A smell had settled in. The house was filled with the smell of the dog. No one watched how well he followed the rules, especially now that there were no carpets or couches. The man with a key wore a new face every time, moving through the house insecurely as if patting around in the dark. Once he forgot to close the patio doors on his way out. It had been a long time. The dog walked out.
He discovered that the outside world went on eternally in all directions. If he padded on one way long enough, he would arrive back where he started. Sun flies, night mosquitoes, fleas made an address out of him. Bands of silver riffled over each strand of black and, like a fish on TV, he pulsed the light over his back with a shudder.
He walked sore. He kept his eyes and nose peeled for the declaration of territory. The world was all neighbors. One house vibrated off another with a strong opposing magnetism, almost touching. He walked until there were fences and then he crawled under fences. The blood from his friction against the world smelled like his name around his neck. There were owners inside houses who didn’t seem to own anything or anyone. Some looked at him a while, moved their mouths at him, but turned away.
He walked in a straight line, so when he arrived at the edge of an abandoned pool, he swam right across. It was his first time swimming, but it felt like walking with slightly more strain on staying alive. This gave walking on land a new sense of relief. He surfaced with algae and water strider legs in his hair until the sun burned off the excess and he strode on the same.
A girl touched his name in the dark. She tied a rope from his name to her hand and led him through the street back to the white house. She looked into a window and saw darkness. She rang the doorbell and it echoed in the dark. She said a word he knew and he obeyed it. He stayed. He laid down on the familiar stoop, where the owner had once stood hundreds of times, dropping his leash and fumbling for keys. And he would sit there and could’ve sat there a long time, maybe forever, still perfectly clean.
He walked in the other direction, now dragging the rope, feeling the pull on his neck. He passed through gardens of preference. The soil beneath was dry and full of lead. He knew—he could taste it. He ate what enticed him: wild onions, birdseed, a dead squirrel, husks of fruit slouching towards rot. All of it, he regurgitated. Shame bred inside him like the smell of the pool festering in his fur. He tried to walk it off, but it followed him.
The yards began to ripple into hills, stretching into fields. Houses isolated themselves. Sound diffused. When he slept—he slept according to the emotions of his legs—he dreamt in a language outside call and response. Conversational. In the dream, his speech meandered, rose and fell enjoyably, but he couldn’t understand it. He whined outside the dream. Some death exhaled in the night—he recognized it, knew its singular parameter. If death was ever inside, it had to be taken outside. It thrived outside, multiplied. It was what uncleanliness circled around, wound its way toward.
He knew he was still alive because he smelled strongly of the pool. His senses were heightened. There was no longer any refuge from the world and its everywhereness. He also knew he was alive because he was always hungry. Sometimes he would pick up a bone to attend to. When the bone began to taste more like his own mouth than the meat, he grew lonely.
He sniffed the back of a porcupine. This recreation proved very painful. He walked with spines in his snout and jowls, swallowing blood when his mouth overflowed. He couldn’t help but once again feel domesticated by pain. Two owners took him into their arms and brought him to a house full of objects. He hadn’t been inside of anywhere in a long time. The owners didn’t speak to each other, only to the dog between them. They had recently stopped loving each other, but they could love something else briefly again out of pity. Spear by spear, they pulled, careful to move the quill according to the direction of the barbs. It seemed familiar to them, as if this wasn’t their first time, but it’d been a long time since then and this was an act of nostalgia.
Once the quills were removed, there was no more blood, just holes. The owners relinquished their roles, as if hanging up a coat they put on to check the mail. They picked him up, though he was heavy, and set him down outside. The nostalgia had faded and he didn’t want to live in the space of something or someone they once had. Instead, he walked in the direction of away.
It was from this direction that the dog wandered onto the farm where he would be loved. He learned over the course of several days that the land loved him and the sky loved him and God loved him and Man loved him. God and Man worked the same acres. Man washed him down with a hose, placing his thumb over the nozzle to translate the language of water so it reached the dog softly. Man tended to his house, though the house was older than him, and refused to give up its habits of dust and memory. He loved his furniture like grandchildren. He loved the dog in a different way, like a piece of good news.
The dog came and went freely from his home, in and out of the sonar of love, but never beyond its reality. Its origin point blinked like a tower’s singular light above the open plains, but the dog felt no loyalty to it, it didn’t keep him, it blinked without demand, without homing. The farmer gave him a new name but it was synonymous with a greeting.
A glow came to him in his sleep. It was a feeling. In the air, there was no call and no response. He was a part of the blood of all things—a warmth even stones had or at least had once descended from. The glowing was strongest in the daylight. His fur was hot to the touch, though no one was touching him, and his skin was cool beneath. He turned his head back to lick his foreleg, and it tasted sweet like fruit, and he was no longer hungry.
The dog didn’t eat again, releasing him from the purge, but not from desire. Sometimes he missed the taste of salt. Strange flavors. Interacting with the world. In the new quiet, in full sun, satisfied, he was reminded of the patio, its untouched tiles and open lawn. All that time, why didn’t I leave? The dog thought with his eyes closed.
The farmer stopped putting innards out in a silver bowl because other wild animals ate it and not his own. He thought the dog must have several owners in the neighborhood of the world and someone else must be feeding him better.
The dog was green under the public display of fur. He walked slowly, following the migrations of light, he was old now. Why didn’t I leave, he found himself asking, retiring inside himself, very full, why did I stay.
