We kept the deformed dogs in a bunk house behind the septic field. I used to visit them daily, but after the first three months, I cut my visits back to once a week. It was too sad to see their misshapen paws clattering against the windowpanes as I’d walk up the path that led from the main house’s back door to the bunk house. It was too pathetic to listen to the hungry barks and whimpers coming from their poor, toothless mouths after Jenny or I had dumped one-half cup of raw ground beef for each dog into the collective feeding trough.
Jenny used to be my wife. She convinced me to sell my real-estate practice and open a shelter for disfigured dogs, the kind of dogs that you’d find dead on a roadside with vultures shoulder-deep in their doggy guts if kind souls like Jenny didn’t rescue them. Jenny was the one who wrangled the stray dogs, paid a contractor to build the bunk house, and lured the dogs inside using raw steak. We had a good thing going for a while. I almost started to like the dogs and had finally stopped waking up nightly in a cold sweat, wondering how we would make ends meet with the exactly $0 we made each month from the shelter. Then Jenny fell in love with her Swedish swimming instructor, divorced me, married him, and generally made my life hell.
The other person I need to mention is Jeremy. Around the time that Jenny started sleeping with the Swede and already had one foot out the door of our marriage, she suggested that we hire someone to help out with the dogs so it wouldn’t be such a burden on her. So with money left over from my last big house sale, I started paying Jeremy to feed the dogs the six days each week that I wasn’t doing it. Jeremy was a good kid. He graduated high school at the top of his class, valedictorian and a full ride to college, but he decided to reevaluate his life after his father died in a motorcycle accident. His decision: to abandon all plans for intellectual growth and, instead, to spend his days caring for our shockingly malformed and pathetically demented dogs.
Even after the divorce went through, Jenny still chose to drop by once a month. When she visited, she drove straight past the house where I passed the time drinking black coffee and grinding up cuts of lean chuck roast for the dogs. She drove straight across the septic field and parked by the bunk house. She shouted for Jeremy and he came trotting, eager to lavish love on the dogs. The way Jeremy would hang on every word she said was a little cute and a little sad. Maybe he was halfway in love with her. With the kid in her wake, Jenny would make a great fuss over the animals, dropping the highest-quality ground beef into their bowls, patting their abnormal heads, and cooing soft words into the holes where their ears once were.
Things went on this way until Chief came along. Chief wasn’t one of the original 30 deformed dogs that Jenny found through word of mouth, tasteful ads in classified newspaper sections, and strategically placed bowls of kibble lightly laced with sedatives. He wasn’t one of the second string of 11 traumatized dogs we rescued from an overturned Animal Control truck—and this just days before Jenny and I finalized our divorce—after half of the first batch died off. Chief just showed up. Jeremy was the first to spot him, since the kid spent about three hours a day watching the fringes of the woods behind the bunk house with a pair of binoculars. Chief dragged himself out from beneath a tree one day in March, shivering and miserable. Jeremy lured him into the bunk house and took mercy on him, drying him with one of the special dog towels, patting the poorly healed scars where his back legs should have been, and declaring that we would keep him.
So then we had Chief. The thing was, I came to like Chief. Now that Jenny was out of the picture, I even brought Chief into the house a few days each week. I’d let him crawl up on the sofa and scratch him behind his floppy ears. This was star treatment. With the other dogs, I’d rub their snouts once a week if they seemed particularly despondent. They never got jealous of the attention I gave Chief, though, and just kept going about their lives as usual.
Things went along like this for about a year, until Jeremy died. It poured rain one night in June. When the storm started, I had moved my truck to the top of the hill so it wouldn’t be stuck in the mud the next morning. But I forgot to put the emergency brake on. Jeremy had gone outside, probably to make sure that the dogs’ patched roof wasn’t leaking. And somehow he had slipped and fallen, and the poorly parked truck had rolled down the hill and right over him.
I rushed outside as soon as I heard the brakes begin to give and stepped out into the storm just in time to see the truck run over Jeremy’s frame. Then it hit the side of the house while I was standing in the pouring rain looking down at his skinny body. There was his crushed chest, halfway mashed into the mud. And there was his head, rotated like an owl’s so that he could have looked behind himself if he was still alive.
And that was it for poor Jeremy.
There was an investigation into his death, but it was determined to be an accident. After a few months, the press stopped trying to peer in between the curtains and the crank callers stopped waking me up at 3 in the morning to tell me that I would burn in hell, slow-roasted on a spit by Satan himself, and I was able to get back to whatever remained of my life. But as soon as my normal life came rushing back over me—no wife, no job, only a depressing number of disfigured dogs in a collapsing shed that hulked at the back of my yard—I realized that I didn’t want any of it. My life was an ugly, shriveled thing.
Jenny started visiting less frequently after Jeremy died. Once or twice, I found her curled up at the bottom of a deep pile of dogs, crying softly to herself. She didn’t have the heart to caress them or play with them. She no longer brought them the highest-quality ground beef. She basically stopped giving a shit about the dogs after Jeremy died.
And the more I fed the dogs, the more I scratched and patted and hosed the dogs down, the more I washed their patchy clumps of fur with flea shampoo and picked ticks off them with tweezers, the more I started to feel like they had it better than me. The dogs kept each other company. They loved each other and spent each night in a massive pile of crooked tails and oddly bent legs, while I slept alone in a too-large bed.
So one day after I drank a pint of whiskey, vomited it up, then drank a second pint and vomited that up too, I staggered out to the bunk house. I had fed the dogs before I started to drink, and they were still nibbling at the ground beef. Flies buzzed around the lukewarm mounds of food. I felt like I might puke again, so I crouched. I got down on all fours. Chief propped himself up on two legs and dragged his body over from the corner where he had been napping.
I looked at Chief. He looked back at me. Drool poured out from the opening where the front half of his bottom jaw used to be. Chief lowered his head to the collective feeding trough and began to eat in his slow, stuttering way. Ground beef went flying. I thought about all the things that separated me from this poor animal: my intact bones and functioning organs, my viable jaws, my skin which, while not perfect, was not afflicted with sores and lesions. But then I remembered how sad Jenny had been at Jeremy’s funeral, how she had cried and cried and let the mascara smear black clots down her face, all while managing to fix me with a series of absolutely withering glares. I remembered how broken Jeremy’s mother had looked standing over his grave. I thought of my own anger and despondency on those long, black nights after Jeremy was gone, how I had wanted to die but hadn’t been able to get my hands on anything more lethal than a spring-powered pellet gun.
Chief was slobbering away and looked at me out of the corner of one eye. I lowered my head to the collective feeding trough. I inhaled deeply and smelled the warm meat. It was not pleasant, but I’d smelled worse. I looked up at Chief and said, “This is for Jeremy, buddy.” He didn’t look impressed. I tapped him in the center of the bald spot that covered the top of his head. I said, “This is for Jenny.” Chief looked at me gently for half a second, then dropped his head to the ground beef. I sighed and looked into the collective feeding trough. I opened my drool-free jaws and took what I knew would be the first of many bites.
Connor Fisher is the author of A Renaissance with Eyelids (Schism Press, 2024), The Isotope of I (Schism Press, 2021) and three poetry and hybrid chapbooks including The Unholy Moon (salò press, 2024). He has an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Georgia. His writing has appeared in journals including Denver Quarterly, Random Sample Review, Tammy, The Colorado Review, and Clade Song. He currently lives and teaches in northern Mississippi.
Read Connor’s story in Propagule 3 here.