Final Cry

The dog that always barks, manic and severe, when Henry turns around the bend of Osprey Court and begins the long passage through rows of gleaming-white, square-box houses until he finally lights upon the box he now claims as his own is, this time, silent.  He wonders what might have become of the yipping motherfucker, the little reactionary, seeing unconventioned monsters in every shadow, writhing in paranoia until each bubble of biting sound boils up from its limbic brain.  Had its frightful, deathly Other finally materialized through the evening fog, creeping in from a vestigial legacy of primordial violence?  Had it, in more secular terms, been taken by a bear or wolf in the night, dragged out into the woods to be consumed?  What are bears and wolves if not the impotent attempts of domestic grasping to categorize, define, and colonize the implacable darkness of the undomesticated world?  The little dog itself is one such attempt.  But eventually the wolf takes over, reclaims its own.

The dog might have turned on its Master.  Spurred on by some undisclosed bacteria, in the gut or in the folds of the cortex, it may have sunk its teeth deep into a stroking hand.  This hand wanders absently among tufts of fur until a vague attempt to transcend the line of species designation through conditioned affection is punctuated in the spilling of blood, splattering like abstract expressionism onto the rug.  The wound can be dressed, but the relationship is assassinated in an instant, the illusion of eternal closeness shattered.  Time to put the fucker down.  He’s gone wild, ornery, or rabid.  And so the people who took his balls come back for the rest of him.  Ashes to science, dust to doctorate.  We think we’ve put the wolf down, but we’ve only silenced a representation.

The next night, like every night, Henry stalks the rows upon rows of ranch-style, white vinyl siding in silent repose.  The numbers pasted onto mailboxes in little golden pieces of aluminum count down to five-hundred as twenty-mile-per-hour winds rip dead and dying leaves off of autumn branches.  Like every night, he passes the bend in Osprey Court on the way back to the orientation of walls he now calls home.  He listens and hears the dog’s barking, high-pitched and ragged, each frantic spasm of the vocal cords cutting in on the last, resounding through the great asphalt basin of the suburb.