A Rising Fall

by C. Sean McGee

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  “Get rid of this feckin mongrel” was what The Old Drunk Bastard had said as he rested his plastic shoe into Ruff’s bum.

  The dog went flying through the air and landed in a skid at the far end of the room; his tail tight between his legs and tucked firm to his belly. He wasn’t a big dog and a kick like that from a man even as inebriated and insensible as The Old Drunk Bastard was quite a reckoning.

  For a second there, as he flew up and over the rows of stupefied humans lying in a den of their own conscious absence; The Nest workers, dissipating their focus voluntarily, it occurred to him; as it would occur to any dog whose arse had just been graced with a tender boot, that he had just done wrong.

  He landed with a thud of guilt slapping on his adorable face; his bum pinned to the ground, his ears pulled back, his brow lifted, his eyes warm and not at all menacing and his whimper; pathetic but forgiving.

  The Old Drunk Bastard mumbled something to some other men as he stumbled off to the far end of the room. Ruff felt that he meant no foul and returned his body to its strut as the man called Seamus picked him up gently and carried him out under one arm, letting him free just outside the entrance.

  “It’s ok Ruff. He means no foul. He has a heart ‘o gold just at de moment he’s showin off his brass balls to da men in dere so come back later. I’ll fix ya some supper” said Seamus to Ruff as he lowered him to the ground, scratching roughly behind his ears.

  Ruff barked in appreciation; a smile lit his doggy face, his eyes widened, his ears sat tall, his tail flung about in joyous swing and his feet took to the cold pavement while in his wake, the young Irishman stood leaning against the doorframe watching the animal pitter-patter up the street completely unaffected by the blistering cold, the civil abandon or the recent foot to his bum. Seamus smiled and returned back into the den and attended to some miscreant clients.

  Ruff, the dog made his way through the town as if the master key to its doors itself was hidden somewhere in his matted fur; confident, assured and belonging.

  Being a dog, Ruff thought little much of anything. He partook in little to no soul-gazing or self-discovery; those internal journeys where one mapped out and tore off layers of their identity like last year’s winter fashion preparing to assume a new better self by acquiring more timeless garments and expressions that would only be relevant for the following six months.

  Ruff did no thinking at all.

  After-all he was fact, a dog.

  That’s not to say that Ruff didn’t live a life of fancy, one of adventure and one of constant discovery. You see to Ruff, everything seen was everything found so everything he came upon was, in fact, a brilliant discovery and every walk around a block, an adventure.

  His survival after the blackout was always going to be without question. Though he had been; in times past, of servitude, obedience and companionship, he was; being a dog, quite adaptable. His instincts had never left him, as of course, they never do. This new city though brought him greater promise and in that it also brought him fame.

  To know Ruff is to know his mother and father or should one say fathers; for Ruff’s mother was at a time, popular so to speak. When his mother fell pregnant, the strays in the street; which once fought for her attention, then made no time for her. She would move about the group looking for some paternal reaction from anyone in the pack but instead she was frightened off with ireful snarls; their noses lifting, saliva, pouring from their glaring sharp front teeth and the hairs on the beasts’ necks standing on end. Their instinct wanted nothing of her dependant madness.

  Back at home, his mother’s big friends became stranger in their affection as her belly started to grow. Where once they would greet her with jubilation and mania, now they merely sat at the big table and mentioned her name in a low displeasing manner. His mother didn’t warm to this new banter from her friends. Her instincts gave her a sense of concern.

  In the final months of her pregnancy, Ruff’s mother was taken out by the big friend while his lady friend stood in the corner crying desperately. With a stern hand gripping the scruff of her neck she turned to the see the crying lady friend and whimpered lightly as if to say, “I understand.”

  “It’ll be ok, we’ll get another one” were the last words Ruff’s mother heard as the big friend forced the choker onto her neck and dragged her through the front door; her hind legs split, her nails digging into the grout between the tiles, her back arched and the force of her being positioned to her rump, stifling the misdirected leverage of the big friend who, unsure of his own centre’s balance, fell over himself in a fit of rage.

  The bitch simply held her weight in her bum and lent her head forwards until the big friend with coarseness in his tongue reached from under her belly and without a hint of sensitivity, scooped her up in one hand, securing her neck with the other and threw her into the back seat of the car.

  When she finally bit her way through the plastic bag, the big friend was gone. Still, she lifted her heavy body and crawled out from the black bag enticed by the thrill of game for even at the end of her pregnancy she was never shy of play.

  The sky was now dark and strange sounds completely unknown to her filled the night. The soil beneath her paws was damp and sludgy. She patted about moving away from the upturned bin where she had been placed and found some other dogs in the distance chasing one another and feasting on scraps from the garbage about them.

  When she approached, the pack encircled her; their necks arched to the ground, their sensitive noses sniffing the cold air, making sense of her scent. The alpha dog moved in and sniffed her entire body as she pulled her tail between her legs, her ears pinned, her legs shaking and her heavy belly swishing against the floor.

  The alpha barked wildly and she lifted and ran. As she did a large metal thing flew to where she had been laying and smashed into pieces on the ground and just behind the object broke the sound of two humans joking and laughing amongst themselves as they ran off into the distance.

  The pack formed a circle around Ruff’s mother once again, each snarling mouth and glaring eye facing out into the formidable darkness; watching, alert, focused, At Being.

  The alpha nudged at Ruff’s mother’s belly encouraging her to unfold from her retreated position and lay on her side. The dog, whose coat was sleek and as black as the night itself lowered himself to the expecting mother and proceeded to lick her head, her back and behind her ears. A state of calm became her and in an instant, she submitted to the course of nature.

  Her labour was quick and without arduous complication. She; like her son, was a dog, so her absence of critical conscious distraction meant that in fact, her entire existence was a submittal to nature. The lack of conscious interplay and internal dialogue meant she didn’t’ succumb to any internal amplifications and reverberations of what she experienced.

  She experienced pain; she didn’t relive it or dilate it. She experienced yearning; she didn’t objectify and dissect it. She experienced anticipation and joy, she didn’t postpone it. She was a dog. She experienced. That’s it.

  And in her labour she did not scream wildly, beg for someone or something to take the pain away or wish that it would just all be over right then and there. She merely lay on her side, breathed heavier than usual and experienced a moment, at one with nature, while her children were being born and while nature was in fact; being,

  As each child was born, the black alpha dog; a shadow by day invisible at night, gently took each one close to their mother’s face. The mother was At Being, the complete presence of herself being now inside her own womb and parting her legs.

  Every other organ and living vice played second fiddle in this moment like a fingernail to a marathon runner as the weight of his focus drives his legs through the finish. She was no longer a walking, crawling, flea ridden canine fighting for scraps of meat and chasing bicycle wheels, she was, in fact, her own womb, her ovaries, her perennial, her fluids and her vagina. She was at every moment, holding e
ach child as they made their way through and out of her body, unto life.

  After the final child was born, she moved her weary head to look to the alpha that now stood above a small pack of tiny children. The alpha; Shadow, had licked each child thoroughly cleaning them and nudging them awake to prepare for nurturing upon their mother’s breast as nature intended. He stood, though, morose, as one child whimpered and blindly found his mother’s teat suckling and then falling into comfort. She had been the birth of six children that night, she had lived six times more than she had lived before, but now only one child suckled at her breast.

  She looked to where Shadow, the alpha dog stood and before him, at the tip of his long snout, five children lay, still and without being. Shadow’s eyes were heavy and sadness crept about him. The two fell upon one another’s stare for a moment before the mother turned to her nursing child and was At Love, licking his back; lifting him high into the air which each long stroke of her tongue and watching his rear fall back down upon her warm belly; her nipple never leaving the young child’s clasp.

  The intention of nature was nature’s to attend.

  Ruff, his mother and Shadow, his new paternal protector, slept through the night; mother and father watching over the child as a ferocious pack of canines watched over the resting family.

  Ruff patted away at the footpath in the same manner his mother had done on the wet muddy ground years before. As each leg kicked out to the side in every stride, his tongue stuck out wide, his mouth pulled back to a massive grin and his eyes widened to take in every moment of this new adventure. His ears flicked back and forth as he moved about picking up on bits of this and that, the banter of stranger friends about the streets and the communication of other dogs echoing through the maze of buildings. Being a dog was about momentum and instinct and the instinct of being a dog was; to be happy.

  Some loud bangs caught Ruff’s attention and he moved in a direction common to him. In the centre of town mingled a mix of good and bad friends. The good friends would greet Ruff with congenial eyes and pull him closer to their freezing bodies roughly running their hands and long nails through his matted fur scratching his skin and reducing Ruff to an ecstatic whimper where his knee joints would buckle, his bum would hover just above the ground and one of his legs would ride up to and scratch wildly at his neck as then finally, both legs would beat on the ground rampantly like an exalted doggy tap dance extravaganza.

  Then there were the bad friends, those whose adaptation in this new world was one of imitation and intimidation. They learned to be more like a dog to find their way through the waste of a buried society to cling idly to the hope of one more day alive. There was no give in their take.

  The bad friends learned of Ruff’s prowess, they sensed his state of nature and they followed him hungrily. They would wait until the agile animal had found food through the waste of others and would pounce upon him to claim their prize. They were very tricky and could not be trusted, but it was not to say that all were in that vein.

  Ruff’s instincts adapted with the new reason and new ambience to better read the sub-conscious intentions and new instinctual At Being states of these desperate uncivilised friends.

  “Aye, Ruff” spoke an old scruffy man sitting at the front of a large concrete structure with its walls all lined with sharply tangled stabbing wires. Ruff pitter patted his worn paws and sat in front of the old man, his tongue panting to the side of his mouth.

  “You been on a venture boy? aye?” The Old Man asked, shaking Ruff’s head roughly from side to side with his two hands then scratching behind his ears.

  Of all the grandness existence had on offer, surely nothing came close to this; to be At Being where one’s ears were being scratched rigorously and one’s back leg was kicking away uncontrollably and at the height of such event, one let out a tremendous howl of appreciation.

  At Love, would have to be the sweetest state of being.

  “You’re a good boy, int ya?” said The Old Man as he pulled Ruff close to his grimy hairy face and kissed his lips.

  Ruff; impartial to a good kiss, gave one right back on The Old Man’s lips then walked off in the other direction. For that moment, the old man forgot his hunger; both physical and metaphysical and Ruff, the ache in the broken skin on his paws.

  Love was grand stuff and like any good drug, the two would be back for more, they could be sure of that. One wouldn’t doubt it and one wouldn’t comprehend it, but their instincts would always cross their paths.

  Ruff casually moved through the legs of a one-armed man taking guard of a door but apparently lost At Distraction; his eyes up and to the right, the theatre in his mind, obviously running the good old repeats. He made his way without much trouble through the foyer where the usually armed guard were not present. Instead, they lined the streets outside, their ordered yelling creating waves of panicked cries out in the distance where for Ruff, the sound played like an orchestra by his side, deafening and frightening.

  He walked towards the door at the far end of the foyer where a man and woman were locked in stare reciting to one another. They didn’t notice Ruff as he passed under their table and through their legs, sniffing away for scraps of meat or vegetables that usually piled on the floor by their feet. The door behind the pair opened with a White Heart exiting towards the street and before his feet had even crossed the frame, Ruff was already inside the complex, making light his adventure through the land of Children and delicious orange things.

  He made his way to the far side of the complex where some children were in a group on the floor playing like a big human ball. The adventure in him called him closer. Children were always such great friends and there were so many inside these walls, although more times than he cared to remember, their love could hurt.

  There was a fine line between a choke and a cuddle, and a dog would call a choke a cuddle until he couldn’t handle being choked anymore. His instinct though caught sight of a big friend sitting in watch by the children and so he kept in the shadow sneaking past her back quietly, moving to where the food was kept.

  When he arrived, there were only a few workers present. He casually moved through the rows of food and pulled at some green leaves protruding though the soil. The orange ones were his favourite. The taste was delectable and they bunched easily so he could easily take a stock back to his retreat and give one or two to his big friend at the front of the complex.

  One of the workers spotted him pulling at the leaves and ran after him in haste waving a long stick through the air but having no control of its swing. Eventually, the stick caught in the soil and snapped under the pressure sending the small man tumbling over himself. Ruff ran towards the man barking and wagging his tail; prancing about and jumping back and forth, taunting the man into play. The man got up and ran after Ruff, the two darting this way and that, carving circles in the paddock, tearing up what little crop there was in this poisoned soil.

  The more they ran, the angrier the man got. The angrier the man got, the more Ruff thought he wanted to play so round they went; round and round and round and round until the worker tripped in a wet muddy part of the soil and planted his face in the dirt. Ruff ran back to where the orange things were kept, the play making him all the hungrier.

  As he pulled on the green top of the orange food he heard a horrible whining sound that contorted with repugnant detestation; like a broken air raid siren being wound in a slow pained manner.

  Ruff turned his head slowly keeping his paws planted in the soil and his body arched, primed to run or attack.