To this day, no one in my wife’s family is sure where Maura got that awful thing.
Maura is my mother-in-law, and as far as psycho bitch mothers-in-law go, she’s among the psycho-bitchiest of them all. I’m not being an asshole; it’s true. Even her own children admit it, and her eldest daughter (also my wife) Amy is by far the most vocal about. She is also the most willing to stand up to her. So when Amy and I had our daughter Lily (Maura’s first grandchild) and Maura became dangerously obsessed with the baby to the point of trying to kidnap her, Amy put her foot down and declared that Maura would only be allowed to see Lily at family gatherings, and even then, she was not allowed to hold her.
Maura sulked like a four-year-old put in time-out, but complied, if only because Amy was threatening her with a restraining order. But she felt listless without a small, vulnerable creature to smother, and so she went and got herself a dog. She named it Banjo, and had the creature not been so repulsive, I might have felt bad for it, being saddled with such a stupid name on top of having someone like Maura as his owner.
Amy and I formally met Banjo at Sunday Dinner, a long-held tradition in the family that no one could bring themselves to kill, even though it was always a clusterfuck of bad food and screaming fights. That evening, Maura greeted us at the front door with an unnerving grin on her heavily-powdered face. Her lips, painted their patented candy-apple-red, were stretched so wide you could see every single tooth. I got a feeling in my stomach like my guts were falling through a trapdoor. A grin like that from someone like Maura can only mean disaster.
“Oh, it’s so wonderful to see you!” she gushed, practically vibrating with excitement. “Now you can finally meet Banjo!”
She hustled us inside, babbling on about how cute Banjo was, how well-behaved, how he was so much easier to care for compared to her three children. As we were led deeper inside the house, I became aware of an unpleasant smell, like spoiled milk.
When we reached the living room, Maura ushered us in, practically incandescent with smugness. “Meet Banjo!”
Sitting on a round olive-green dog bed was an… animal of some sort. It had an emaciated-looking body with protruding ribs, the knobs of its spine elongated and jutting upwards like the spikes on a stegosaurus. Its neck was disproportionately long and didn’t look strong enough to support its bulbous head, which was made to look even bigger by the round, satellite-dish-like ears. Its face was a flattened abomination that bore a striking resemblance to that of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but lacked any of the iconic movie character’s “so ugly he’s adorable” charm. Large patches of its short, bristly greyish-yellow fur were missing, exposing naked areas of scabby pink flesh. It wagged its rat-like tail and opened its mouth, revealing a fat purple tongue and small yellowish teeth that looked more human than canine.
I could only gape at it in astonished disgust. It was Amy who finally gave voice to what we were both thinking: “What the fuck is that thing?”
Banjo blinked his sunken eyes. The whites were bright yellow, the irises a muddy brown. It made me think of turds swimming happily in sunny pools of piss.
Maura giggled in a girlish way and patted the creature’s head. “Isn’t he just the cutest thing?”
“He’s horrible!” said Amy, clutching Lily protectively against her chest. “And he smells like he’s decomposing! Kindly get him the fuck away from my child.”
Maura laughed again, a high pitched, tinkling sound that felt like thousands of icy needles dancing up and down my spine. “He’s so well-behaved! Much more so than you kids ever were! I never knew that being a parent could be so much fun until now!”
Amy’s younger brother and sister, Cameron and Ella, were both sitting on the couch, and both seemed to sag at their mother’s words.
“Go on, Mum,” Ella hissed. “Tell Amy about how you love that hideous little thing more than you’ve ever loved your babies.”
Maura waved her off like she was a fly buzzing about. “You’re just jealous, Ella, because no animal could survive even a day in your care.”
Ella growled, a sound that was then mimicked perfectly by Banjo.
Maura gasped as if she had just discovered the Holy Grail. “Oh my goodness, did you hear that? What a clever boy you are, Banjo!”
“Where’s Dad?” Amy barked. “I need to have a word with him.”
“In the shed,” Cameron muttered.
Amy wordlessly handed Lily to me, then stormed off to the back yard to tear her “sycophantic simpleton” (her words, not mine) of a father a new one for letting Maura bring that thing into the house. Lily and I joined Ella and Cameron on the couch, and we watched Maura coo over Banjo, baby-talking to him in a high-pitched squeal of a voice that felt like an ice pick being driven into each ear. Cameron and I exchanged a resigned look, like This is gonna fucking suck.
Banjo was now massacring a ratty-looking chew toy, making stomach-curdling slobbering noises and spraying spittle everywhere. That sour milk smell seemed to seep from his pores, and it had stuck to the curtains and the furniture, to our clothes and hair. Lily was fussing in my lap, and I knew that she too was repulsed by the sounds and the stench. It was enough to drive anyone to tears, really.
When Amy returned, her face was like granite, her normally caramel-brown eyes almost black with fury. She sat down next to me, took Lily from me, and began bouncing her in an attempt to call her down. Over the top of our daughter’s curly strawberry-blonde head, she kept shooting Maura and Banjo looks of white-hot hatred.
I began to grow nervous. Amy was genuinely one of the kindest women you could ever meet, but she had also inherited her mother’s quick temper and vindictive streak. She was nowhere near as spiteful or dangerous as Maura, but if you pushed her far enough, things could get ugly very fast.
An hour later, we were all called into the dining room for dinner. Maura, even though she had the culinary skills of a mentally challenged chimpanzee, had done the cooking. She always did the cooking, because she was a firm believer in traditional gender roles. Men worked; women cooked, cleaned, and took care of the children.
Anyway, Maura had cooked the same things she always cooked for Sunday Dinner: a roast so overcooked it resembled a burnt log; limp green beans that had had the green boiled out of them; lumpy greyish mashed potatoes. The lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers in the salad looked wilted and shrivelled; the cheap store-bought bread rolls were spread lumpily with butter that had barely been given any time to soften. Yummy.
And with the sounds and smell spilling in from the living room, it was even less appetizing than normal.
Lily scooped some mashed potatoes into a little bowl for Lily, along with some green beans, which she cut into bite-sized pieces. Lily made exaggerated ew, gross faces like she always did, but ate without much of a fuss.
Maura, of course, had taken charge of the conversation, making sure that she was the one who got to do most of the talking and that it was only shit she wanted to talk about. She gossiped about neighbours, told stories about herself that we had all heard, oh, only a billion times before, and asked us invasive questions about our private lives. This time, however, she kept having to get up every twenty seconds or so to “check on” Banjo. And she kept talking about him too.
“He talks, you know,” she gushed.
Amy snorted. “Sure, Mum.”
“No, really!” Maura insisted in that manic way she had.
Then, from the living room, came a sound that slowed the crawl of blood in my veins.
No, really…
The voice was warped, nothing like anything I’d ever heard from any human… but nothing that should be coming out of any animal, dog or not. It sounded like whatever was making the sound didn’t even understand the words… more like it was mimicking the specific sounds that made up the words, if that makes sense.
We were all silent, frozen in a kind of disbelieving horror. The dining room felt cold and eerily quiet, like snowfall at night.
“Holy shit,” Amy finally said. “Was that-“
Holy shit, came the voice again. Holy shit.
Then Banjo staggered into the room.
His movements were twitchy and unnatural. It was less like he was moving of his own volition and more like he was a corpse that was being electrocuted, moving involuntarily in response to the shocks. And he was… well, smiling. If it could even be called that.
“Get out of here!” Amy hissed, jabbing her knife in Banjo’s direction. “Go on, shoo!”
Go on, shoo! I swear Banjo’s “smile” grew wider.
“Oh my goodness!” Maura shrieked, so shrilly that Lily began to cry. She exploded to her feet, sending her chair clattering to the floor. “Oh my goodness! He’s speaking!”
Maura was crying honest-to-God tears of joy as she scooped up Banjo and began smothering him with kisses, gushing about how proud she was of him. I nearly threw up just watching the display.
“This calls for champagne!” Maura declared. “I’ll run to the liquor store! Be right back!”
Be right back coming from someone like Maura didn’t mean the same thing it would mean coming from most people. She always stretched things out so that they took longer than necessary; chances were, she’d be gone for an hour. Maybe more.
Which gave us more than enough time to do what needed to be done.
The task of getting rid of Banjo fell to Cameron and I. He fetched the leash and clipped it to the bright red collar ringing the awful creature’s plant stem of a neck. We brought him out to Cameron’s truck, dumped Banjo in the back seat, and drove away from the house.
“We have to dispose of that thing far away,” said Cameron. “Somewhere Maura won’t find him.”
Somewhere Maura won’t find him, Banjo mimicked. Cameron clenched his jaw and drove faster.
Don’t get us wrong; we weren’t planning on killing Banjo. We just wanted to get rid of him.
Cameron ended up driving to the provincial park not far from Maura’s house. By then, it was dark, and Banjo’s eyes seemed to absorb the moonlight, reflecting it back outward. Now, I know that dog eyes do glow in the dark, but never had I seen a lurid yellow glow like that. It looked artificial, like a neon sign.
Cameron and I led Banjo to a small clearing in the woods. My brother-in-law picked up a stick and threw it. “Fetch, boy!”
He let go of the leash, and Banjo took off, running in a frenetic and twitchy manner. At the tree line, though, he paused and turned back to look at Cameron and I. Except it was now so dark that he was nothing but a misshapen charcoal silhouette against a towering wall of black. All we could see were the twin bright yellow pinpricks of his eyes, and the crescent of his teeth, glowing like a beacon.
Fetch, boy, he called, then laughed. It’s a sound that I still hear in my nightmares.
And then, mercifully, he was gone.
Cameron and I drove back home in a vehicle that still reeked of sour milk; according to Cameron, the smell took weeks to clear out fully. An hour after we got back, Maura returned. We told her that Banjo had run off, and that we had tried to chase him, but lost sight of him. “He could be anywhere,” said Cameron, with a shrug.
Maura sent David (her husband) to search for Banjo in his car while she required her daughters to help her make missing dog flyers. She spent the following week palstering them on every available surface in the neighbourhood, but of course, Banjo was never found. Maura was devastated, but after a month or so of moping, she got another dog, this time a cute, normal beagle. Of course, this dog was a total menace, and once even bit Lily, causing an enraged Amy to chase him around the back yard with a shovel. But at least it didn’t smell terrible, move like Frankenstein’s monster, or try to fucking talk.
In the year or two following Cameron and I releasing Banjo into the wild, there were reports from that park about attacks on other dogs and even on people, and reports of a strange creature that seemed to mimic human speech. Once, a buddy of mine brought up the topic while we were having a beer after work, asking me if I believed it was true.
“Of course not,” I said. “It’s probably just a normal animal, and people are seeing and hearing things because they’re scared.”
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “But who knows? There is so much weird shit out there that we barely understand.”
Don’t I know it, I thought.
So that’s the story of Banjo, my monster-in-law’s “dog.” Next time, I’ll tell you guys about the time she tried to abduct my daughter because she didn’t think Amy and I were feeding her the right formula.