Hi, I’m not sure where to post this so sorry if it seems really out of place. I’m don’t know if this is going to make a lot of sense, but my dog’s been acting a little strange lately. I’ve had him for about half a year, picked him up at the animal shelter. I couldn’t tell what breed he was supposed to be and the people at the shelter didn’t know, either, thought he was one of those Chinese dogs. That didn’t really bother me, though. We never had any pets when I was a kid so I was pretty excited about the whole thing. Well, I guess it was sort of a way to get back at my ex. She’d gone on like a ski trip with some of her friends and I’d forgotten to water her plants while she was away and they all died. Somehow that led to this huge argument where she called me totally irresponsible and, uh, a lot of other words that I don’t think I can write here. So, that was the end of that. Anyway, the point is that I know who I am and I’m actually a really responsible guy and so that’s why I got a dog, to prove to the world that I’m right and she’s wrong.
When I got the dog at the shelter they told me that his name was Rascal because he just loves getting into trouble. I’m not sure what people usually do after they adopt a dog, if they give it a new name or whatever. It felt kind of weird to just change the dog’s name. I know that if somebody forced me to change my name to, like, Jerry or something I wouldn’t be too happy about it. So I stuck with Rascal. Contrary to what I’d been told, he was actually really well-behaved. I was told he was around five or six years old when I adopted him, so I wasn’t surprised that he was house-trained, but he never barked or knocked over furniture or chased squirrels around. Actually he was smart, freakishly smart, even. If any of you have ever lived alone you probably know what I’m talking about, but sometimes I would just say things to myself out loud. Like, I can’t find my wallet and I get pissed off, so I say something like “Where the fuck’s that god damn piece of shit wallet?” and I emphasize the bad words so I can at least get some amount of enjoyment from the situation. Well, a few moments later I turn around and Rascal’s sitting there with my wallet in his mouth. Stuff like that. It started to weird me out, and sometimes I’d ask him if he understood what I was saying, but he would just stare at me and do that head tilt thing that dogs do.
Now, I’m gonna be honest, I was at a pretty low point in my life around the time I adopted Rascal, and so I also started getting into PUA stuff. PUA stands for “pick-up artist”. Basically, you’re supposed to view your relationships with women as part of a game where the end goal is to bang them. There are all these weird tactics you see posted on PUA sites, I remember reading this story where this guy was bragging about how he used an umbrella as a prop to get a woman to talk to him, I’m not really sure what the point of the story actually was. They have all this bizarre lingo too, like a “K-Close” is when you say goodbye to a woman after a date and she kisses you. You can probably guess what an “F-Close” is. I’m past that phase now, but there were a few months where I was, like, religiously studying that shit. I was going to bang women that were far more attractive than my ex, just as an extra way to show her that I didn’t need her anymore. And that’s where I got the idea to get Rascal to help me scoop up some HBs (that’s PUA lingo for “Hot Babes”). Most women can’t resist petting a dog when they see one, so that sort of gives you an opening to try to talk to them. The thing was, Rascal clearly wasn’t an ordinary dog. Even if he wouldn’t directly acknowledge it, I was pretty sure that he understood English to at least some degree. Maybe even better than me. So I explained the plan to him – when I pulled on his leash twice, quickly, he would play dead, and he would play dead until I said the magic phrase, which was “peanut butter”.
Did he understand me? I wasn’t sure, but the next time I was out for a walk and a woman asked to pet him I did the two-pull and, sure enough, he dropped to the ground like a sack of beans. The woman – a cute little redhead in a tank top and sweats – started crying and I was so impressed by Rascal’s performance that I almost forgot the next part of the script I’d practiced. Poor little Rascal has a heart problem, I stammered out, and sometimes the poor little guy overexerts himself, so I need to take him home and give him his medicine. Well, I was crying too, I was just so emotional over the whole thing, and the redhead could tell that. Clearly I wasn’t in any state to make the trip back to my apartment alone, so she offered to come with me. She wanted to make sure Rascal was okay, after all. And so we went back together to my apartment, and I pretended to give Rascal a pill that I’d hidden in a glob of peanut butter. When I said the magic phrase, he ate the peanut butter and suddenly came back to life. It was perfect. Now, not only did I have a woman over at my place, but we’d also just gone through a traumatic experience together. We had a special bond. I used this tactic on countless women, maybe forty to fifty max, over about a four-month period and it led to an F-Close nearly every time.
Yeah, I’m ashamed that I did that stuff and it feels really embarrassing to type it all out, but I have a reason for mentioning it. It’s not like an act of self-flagellization or anything. I was about two months into my PUA binge and a woman I’d bagged the night before was heading home. Her clothes had been completely torn to shreds (by me) so she was wearing one of my shirts, which was way too big for her. I’d just seen her out the door when I turned around and sitting there, staring at me, was Rascal. I assumed he was expecting like a treat or a pat on the head, but before I could move from where I was standing he opened his dog mouth and said this:
“Tomorrow, it will rain.”
I just stood there, sure that I was on some, like, powder or something. I had to be. Dogs don’t talk, after all. Sometimes they make sounds that sound like talking, but Rascal had just spoken in clear English with a slight midwestern accent. Or at least I’d thought he had. I told myself that I’d just imagined it, maybe I was sleep-deprived from the wild night I’d just had. I gave Rascal a scratch behind the ears, laughed it off, and then started getting ready for work. The next day, it rained.
It happened again a few days later. It was the weekend and I’d just woken up. There was a woman in my bed, the one I’d had the night before. I’d gotten pretty good at the PUA routine by that point, so needless to say she was very beautiful. I was getting out of bed carefully, trying not to wake her, when I realized that Rascal was in the room with us and was once again staring at me. I waved to him, and as I did he began to speak:
“Tomorrow, you will forget to eat lunch.”
Well, I wasn’t really sure what to think after that. I’d heard him just as clearly as last time. Was I losing my mind? I thought I’d look like an idiot if the woman in my bed woke up and saw me trying to have a conversation with my dog, so I just ignored Rascal and went to make breakfast. A few hours later, after she’d went home, I tried to interrogate him. Well, not interrogate, but, you know, something like having an honest conversation where you ask a lot of questions. I thought that if Rascal could talk, maybe he was really shy about it, so I told him that I didn’t think it was weird that he knew how to talk. Shit, maybe all dogs could talk but they’re all too nervous to do it. That was sort of the line of thinking I was headed towards. But, I couldn’t get anything out of him.
What Rascal had said was also a little concerning to me. If I was a dog and I was trying to talk to my owner, I’d probably say something like “Hey, how’s it going?” Not, you know, the stuff about forgetting to eat lunch. Was it supposed to be some kind of prediction? That seemed like an especially crazy thing to consider, but just to be safe I set a reminder for the next day to make sure I didn’t miss lunch. And so, the next day rolled around and I went to work as usual. As it so happened, I ended up getting into this really weird conversation with my boss. Basically, we were debating whether Niagara Falls is in the US or Canada. I was on the side of it being in Canada but my boss insisted that, regardless of its exact location, it’s pretty much an honorary US landmark. Nobody actually wants to visit Canada, he said, they visit the US and if they just so happen to be in the area they’ll go to Niagara Falls for like a day and then dip out. That was sort of the conversation we had, and as you can imagine there were a lot of different directions to go in. So we talked and talked, and before I knew it, it was already five. And as I got into my car, ready to drive home, I realized that Rascal had been right – I had forgotten to eat lunch.
That’s the way it went for a while. Every couple of days I’d run into Rascal staring at me in that strange way of his, and he would tell me about something that was going to happen “tomorrow”. Maybe I would be late for work, maybe I’d get food poisoning, maybe one of my coworkers would try to kiss me. Whenever Rascal said something would happen, it happened, and every time he spoke his voice sounded more and more familiar to me. Yeah, I was sure I’d heard that voice before, and not coming out of my dog’s mouth. It was seriously starting to weird me out. Whenever I was in my apartment and I turned a corner or looked in some random direction I was afraid that I’d see that dog sitting there, ready to say something ridiculous. It wasn’t affecting my pick-up game but I noticed that, in bed, I wasn’t lasting as long as I used to. Probably about a twenty-five to thirty percent reduction. That’s just spit balling it, though, I definitely wasn’t hitting the hour mark every time like before. Maybe my heart just wasn’t in it.
Then, Rascal spoke again. I was cooking dinner, spaghetti alfredo in case you’re curious, and as I walked over to the sink to drain the pasta I spotted him. It had been a few days since the last time he’d spoken, so I had a feeling something was coming, and it did.
“Tomorrow, your sister will die in an accident.”
I just about dropped the spaghetti then and there. All of Rascal’s predictions up to that point had been pretty harmless. There had been one about my boss spilling hot coffee all over himself and having to go to the hospital, but that ended up being funny more than anything else. Now, somebody was going to die? The strangest thing of all was that I didn’t even have a sister. I assumed that that meant Rascal’s prediction wasn’t going to come true. I mean, it was still weird to have a talking dog, but at least he wasn’t, like, an oracle or psychic or something like that. I felt a little relieved.
The next day rolled around and everything seemed to be going fine. Right after I got back from work I received a call from my mother. She sounded distraught (“fucked up” for the non-lit majors out there). It seemed as though someone named Nancy had gotten hit by a truck and wasn’t expected to make it. When I asked who this “Nancy” person was she got mad at me and said something along the lines of “She’s your sister, Petey!” I didn’t really know what to say after that. The conversation dragged on but I barely paid attention. It wasn’t possible to just forget that you had a sister, was it?
Nancy died a few hours later. A funeral was scheduled for the week after, and during the interval Rascal spoke once. He said that the milk in my fridge was going to expire. That one seemed easy enough to beat, so I made sure to drink all the milk I had left then and there. The next day, I opened the fridge and there on the middle shelf sat a half-full carton of milk. I didn’t even bother giving it a sniff, I just threw that shit in the trash. It was then that I decided that enough was enough – the dog had to go. I didn’t want to seem like an irresponsible owner, turning a dog back in after only having it for a few months, so I went to a different animal shelter. They accepted Rascal without asking any questions and even gave me a few bucks for my troubles. I know that you’re probably thinking that I could have just muzzled the dog, but I’d have to take it off when he ate and he would have definitely used that as an opportunity to speak. So call me a bad owner, call me an asshole, call me whatever you want, I don’t give a shit. I wasn’t gonna give that dog a single chance to open his damn mouth in front of me. Anyway, once the funeral was over with, I figured that would be that for all of this bizarro shit.
I don’t know what I can really say about the funeral. My parents had insisted on doing one of those open casket deals. I don’t know why you would ever want to have one of those, it’s just depressing if you ask me. They’d sawed off Nancy’s legs just before she’d died, so the Nancy in the casket also had no legs. When I looked at her, I felt nothing. I felt bad that she’d lost her legs, but that was about it. It made me think about how I would feel if my legs were sawed off. Not being able to walk would be awful and, honestly, I’d probably feel like I was less than human, like a worm or something. What I’m trying to say is that anything I felt when I looked at Nancy’s corpse had no connection to our supposed bond. There was a slideshow, too, with photos of her from when she was alive and had both her legs. I was even in some of them, standing next to her like it was the most natural thing in the world. It got to be too overwhelming for me and I had to hide in the bathroom. I told myself that Rascal was gone, now, and that things were going to go back to normal soon. That calmed me down a little.
When I returned to my apartment after the funeral, the first thing I saw when I opened the door was Rascal sitting there in the entryway. I thought I was looking at a ghost or some shit, like they’d executed him at the animal shelter and now he was haunting me even though I wasn’t the one who’d executed him. I just wasn’t really sure what to do, is what I’m saying. We both stood there for a while, in silence, and slowly I came to accept that I wasn’t looking at a ghost, this was the real-ass Rascal that had somehow wandered back into my home. My heart began to flutter, then, as I realized that I needed to do something about the dog before he spoke again. I picked him up and went straight back to my car so we could go back to the animal shelter. Rascal didn’t speak the whole way there. When I showed up carrying him, the volunteer working there looked surprised and told me they hadn’t even realized that Rascal had escaped. As soon as I’d dropped him off I booked it the fuck out of there.
One day passed, then two, and I began to relax at last. On the morning of the third day I woke up and, sitting beside my bed, was Rascal. Before he could say anything, I got out of bed and ran into the living room. Frantic, I looked for something - anything – and spotted the shovel that I always kept above the fireplace. I removed it from its display and started back towards the bedroom, but as I turned around I saw Rascal just in front of me. I gripped the shovel with both hands and swung it as hard as I could at Rascal’s head, causing it to fly off his body and into the kitchen. His body fell over, motionless, but I didn’t feel safe yet, so I hit it about six or seven times just to be sure. I collected the head and body in a trash bag and took them down the block to the incinerator. The living room carpet was covered in blood, but I wasn’t really in the right headspace to clean it up. Well, I wasn’t really in the right headspace to do anything. I decided not to go to work that day.
The days passed, but somewhere deep in my heart I knew that, eventually, I would turn a corner or open a door and see Rascal sitting there again. The next time I saw him was just as I was leaving the bathroom. My shorts were still around my ankles so I was basically at my most vulnerable. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry, too. But I couldn’t do both at the same time. Rascal started to speak, but before he could get past “Tomorrow” I’d knocked him directly in the head with the shovel. Blood started to spew out of his head and onto the carpet, like some kind of chocolate fountain, except with blood coming out of it instead of chocolate. I dragged Rascal’s lifeless body outside and threw it into the woods, praying that the birds would eat it.
I no longer felt safe in my own home. I called up one of the women I’d F-Closed, her name was either Chloe or Sarah, and reminded her who I was. I told her that I’d been thinking about her a lot lately and eventually managed to convince her to let me stay at her place for a few nights. It was clear that my behavior was sketching her out, always looking behind myself and shit, but – what can I say? – I’d built up a very respectable skillset during the last few months and knew exactly what a woman likes, so she kept me around. A week must have passed, and just as I began to relax my guard I saw him sitting in her kitchen. She was out running errands, so I was alone in the apartment with Rascal. I was paralyzed, then, completely unsure of what to do. A weapon, I needed a weapon, could a rolling pin kill a dog? No, a knife, I needed a knife, but where were the knives? Before I could make up my mind Rascal had already started to speak, and I had no time to close the distance between us to shut him up:
“Tomorrow, you will lose three teeth.”
I saw a drawer labelled “Knives” and opened it in a rush, finding lots and lots of knives. I grabbed the biggest one and rushed at Rascal, stabbing him over and over all over his body. He didn’t make a sound or try to resist. When I came to, I realized that the entire kitchen was covered in blood and dog parts. In a panic I rushed out of the apartment, still completely nude. I ran all the way home, then threw my phone down the garbage disposal and shaved my head.
I knew what was going to happen the next day, but all I could do was brace myself for it. I ate pudding for lunch, one of those little cups you can buy at the grocery store (chocolate flavor), yet somehow I could feel the pudding knocking a few of my teeth loose. Three, of course. I took a pair of pliers and pulled them out so that I could get things over with. It didn’t really hurt, and there wasn’t much blood, but it still felt strange to be missing a few teeth.
Rascal’s visits became more and more frequent. Before long, I was seeing him every single day. I made sure to have a shovel in every room of the apartment. Going outside was no longer an option, because if I ran into Rascal while there were other people around, I’d have to either hear his prophecy or look like a dog-killing psychopath. And so the blood grew thicker and thicker. Soon it covered the furniture, then the walls, then the ceiling. My entire apartment was stained with the blood of that bastard dog. Then, the blood began to saturate the air, like a great blood mist or blood fog. I could barely see more than a few feet ahead of me and any noise, no matter how small, sent me reaching for the nearest shovel. Sometimes I would see strange shapes in the blood fog, moving around like a ball of worms. I would try to swat them out of the air but they always floated just out of reach, taunting me.
Eventually the food I’d stockpiled ran out, forcing me to feed on Rascal. Each kill meant two more meals, transforming our relationship into one of hunter-prey. Did Rascal sense it? I wasn’t sure. Each time I encountered him, he was still just sitting there, getting ready to say something. Then, I fucked up – I missed my swing and sent the shovel straight through the wall. All my hair fell out the next day. I fucked up another time – dropped the shovel before I could take Rascal out. The skin on my left hand peeled off after that one. Now, Rascal was appearing multiple times per day. There was no way I could eat that much meat, and so the bodies began to pile up and up, surrounding me in a world of blood and dog. Corpses that they were, I could feel the essence of Rascal enveloping me as the walls began to close in. The walls of dog. I could hear them breathing, hear them howling, hear them whining. It didn’t sound like Rascal, though – these were the cries of people.
Before long the bodies had compacted into one giant, fleshy, furry mass. When I touched it I could feel a pulse, and when I hit it with the shovel it bled. There wasn’t much else to do when Rascal wasn’t around, so I spent a lot of time staring at the thing that now surrounded me. Well, that thing was Rascal, is what I told myself. A lot of Rascals. I tried digging through it once, but I soon hit a layer of solid bone that snapped the shovel in two. I was afraid of running out of shovels, so I didn’t try it again. I preferred to watch, anyway.
Then, we come to today, or what I think is today. It must be today. I’ve been trapped in the bedroom for a while now. The dogs are packed from floor to ceiling and I reckon I only have a few square feet of space to move around in. I try to block out the screams but no matter how hard I try I just can’t. I guess you could say I’ve gotten tired of this shit. I looked up and saw Rascal sitting there, on a ledge that had formed in the dog wall. I started to lift my shovel but decided against it. When Rascal spoke, I really listened. For the first time, I wasn’t caught off-guard and I wasn’t trying to kill him. I just stood there and listened, and I realized why his voice had always sounded so familiar – it was mine.
“Tomorrow, we will trade places.”
I didn’t whack him after that, I didn’t strangle him, I didn’t do anything. Finally I decided to take a seat, but felt something cold and hard brush against my naked butt cheeks. Somehow my phone had ended up back here, and it still had a little bit of charge left. I decided I’d ask around online to see if I could figure out what’s been going on with my dog and, well, that’s where we are now. So, what I want to know is whether this sort of thing is normal with dogs. I know that cats have this, like, brain-eating parasite that they can infect you with, so I wouldn’t be surprised if dogs were also capable of some really weird or wacky shit. I didn’t look up any information about dog ownership before I adopted Rascal, so it’s possible that stuff like this happens all the time and is considered pretty common knowledge. If anybody has any tips, feel free to post them or whatever. It would be better if you could reply sooner rather than later, though…