spooky_nine

Coffins used to be built with holes in them, attached to six feet of copper tubing and a bell. The tubing would allow air for victims buried under the mistaken impression they were dead. Harold, the Oakdale gravedigger, upon hearing a bell, went to go see if it was children pretending to be spirits. Sometimes it was also the wind. This time it wasn’t either. A voice from below begged, pleaded to be unburied.

“You Sarah O’Bannon?”

“Yes!” the voice assured.

“You were born on September 17, 1827?”

“Yes!”

“The gravestone here says you died on February 19?”

“No I’m alive, it was a mistake! Dig me up, set me free!”

“Sorry about this, ma’am,” Harold said, stepping on the bell to silence it and plugging up the copper tube with dirt. “But this is August. Whatever you is down there, you ain’t alive no more, and you ain’t comin’ up.”

A man standing at the bus stop
reading the newspaper is on fire
Flames are peeking out
from beneath his collar and cuffs
His shoes have begun to melt

The woman next to him
wants to mention it to him
that he is burning
but she is drowning
Water is everywhere
in her mouth and ears
in her eyes
A stream of water runs
steadily from her blouse

Another woman stands at the bus stop
freezing to death
She tries to stand near the man
who is on fire
to try to melt the icicles
that have formed on her eyelashes
and on her nostrils
to stop her teeth long enough
from chattering to say something
to the woman who is drowning
but the woman who is freezing to death
has trouble moving
with blocks of ice on her feet

It takes the three some time
to board the bus
what with the flames
and water and ice
But when they finally climb the stairs
and take their seats
the driver doesn't even notice
that none of them has paid
because he is tortured
by visions and is wondering
if the man who got off at the last stop
was really being mauled to death
by wild dogs.

i awaken. i don't know it at the moment, but this day marks my fourth straight year of existing in the dogscape. i push myself up from the carpet of writhing, twitching dogflesh beneath me and rise to my feet, stretching in the morning sun. it took me a while to learn to balance on the layer of solid dogs that now blankets every inch of solid ground, but nowadays i can walk and run as easily and as fast as i ever did on soil or concrete. perhaps faster.

this was a city once, i think, though which one i can't remember. i only owe my guess to the massive pillars of dogs jutting into the sky, perhaps ancient buildings now completely filled and overgrown by canine biomatter. i climbed one once, sinking my fingers and toes deep into the dogwall to gain purchase, and after hours and hours of climbing was rewarded with an incredible vista - fur and eyes, panting tongues and wagging tails, hugging the contours of the once-barren land and stretching in a single aeomebic mass farther than the eye can see.

now i don't do that, though. now i merely go about my day. i hike to the Gardens, where the dogplants sprout up in bizarre shapes from the floor of the dogscape, and reach up to pluck the fetal puppyfruits right off the wagging, energetic branches. i bite into the succulent flesh, the juices dribbling down my chin and dripping down to be reabsorbed by the groundflesh, and revel in the savory taste. i'm thirsty, so i range until i find one of the Mothermounds, and there i suckle at a teatpatch until i've had my fill of milk. sometimes i see other humans around me, as well-adapted to the dogscape as i am, but i barely acknowledge them, say nothing. what, after all, is there to say? the world is different now - what meaning would our old words have?

free-ranging dogs are becoming rarer and rarer to see now, and those i do see seem as lost, as passive as i am. they too graze on the dogplants, step carefully over the undulating, bleeding dogfloor, dimly acknowledge myself and one another. in the distant sky, and on the far horizon, i sometimes see massive forms sail or crawl or undulate, and i wonder if in this new world normal, singular, ambulatory dogs have become as obsolete as i am.

i dug down once. down beneath the dogs. beneath the hair and the ears and the barking. it was hard, and took a lot of planning - i had to destroy one of the dogtrees with my hands, rip out the twisted, yards-long communal spines that served them as branches and lash them together with tendons and skin. but soon i had tools - pitchforks, spears, shovels. i picked a spot where the dogfloor seemed shallower and set to work.

the blood started spurting when my spear first broke the surface, and didn't stop for hours and hours and hours. i was drenched in gore and viscera, covered in flecks of bone and meat and brain. but i learned to ignore the sickening squelching sounds, ward off the smell, and just kept going deeper and deeper, spearing and levering out dogs of stranger and stranger size and build, dogs with two heads, dogs with human hands, dogs with writhing tentacles where their back legs should be.

eventually i came to the end of the dogs. or perhaps the beginning of whatever lies beyond dogs. an expanse of multicolored, patchwork fur that extended as far as i could dig in any direction. i could pierce it with great difficulty but it barely bled, and try as i might i could only barely peel the skin away, revealing a layer of striated greyish muscle beneath. it started to tremble as i watched it, shaking the very dogmatter around me, and i realized that the dogscape was beginning to regenerate itself, close in over me, seal me in - so i fled, climbing back up into the light.