by Tim Westover
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The dog smells burning.
The night is dark, but it seems to have been dark for a very long time. If the dog counted things like months and years, he’d understand the concept of millennium; that’s how much time has passed on the ridge south of the river near which a bonfire illuminates a girl surrounded by four laughing men. The dog has no name for the river, but the girl calls it by a word the descendants of those laughing men will one day twist into Chattahoochee.
The girl is tall and slender, her long black hair twined into matching plaits falling to each side of her face. She reminds the dog of the human woman whose blood he can no longer taste on his tongue, but whose last moments he tastes in his heart like a poison flower.
One of the men reaches for the girl. She bites his hand. He jumps back and howls while his fellows point and laugh some more. The night is made blacker by the flickering white light of the bonfire. Another man grasps the girl’s arms from behind, and as she kicks and struggles, two others each grip one of her ankles and lower her to the ground. She does not scream or shout, but the dog reads panic in the thrashing of her limbs, smells the sour scent of her fear rising on heated currents along with downy ash from the flames.
The dog bounds from the trees—trees that hadn’t existed on this meadow the last time he drew smoke-tinged air into his lungs. He feels himself growing more solid as he runs, feels his fur thickening and his blood quickening in his veins. When did he last have veins and blood and fur? The last time fire on this meadow mingled in the air with human pain.
His body slams into the man with a violence that takes the others by surprise. Their cries spill into the night as they drop the dark-haired woman. The men’s hair glints gold and orange in firelight, strange colors like sunset and straw. Other than the braided twists, the girl’s hair is like that of other humans the dog has seen before. She smells just as he remembers people smelling too, like forest and river and tall summer grasses.
The girl scrambles to the dog’s side as he bares his fangs at her tormentors. One man grabs a burning brand from the fire and thrusts it at the dog. The dog sees the glowing red coals of his pupils reflected in the humans’ eyes, the ghostly blue nimbus of his fur and the opalescent gleam of teeth longer and sharper than he’d ever had in life. Another man raises a black metal stick and points it. The girl cringes, her fear striking at the dog like the fangs of a snake. He leaps at the man and feels a buzz and tingle pass through his chest at the first bang and the next.
For the second time the dog tastes human blood, his teeth sinking into the man’s shoulder. Bones crunch deep inside. The man cries out to his departing pack, but they are running, running into the trees. After a last shake and growl, the dog lets him go, and he struggles to his feet and staggers after them, his black metal bang stick dragging in the dirt by his side like a broken limb.
The dog turns and trots back to the fire. The girl kneels before him, bows low with arms spread and hands cupped, and breathes a single word: ofi’. Though her language didn’t exist in the world last time he walked it, he knows, even as he sees himself dissipating into mist against the flickering firelight reflected in her eyes, that the word she whispers to him is dog.