Boy Named Dog

Boy named Dog

The Monsters sleep shoulder to shoulder on the couch reeking of piss and vomit. The boy isn’t afraid. Crouched on all fours he sniffs the air in front of them, and wonders how he will kill them without being caught. He wishes they would kill themselves with their needles and pipes, and the stuff they snort.
The boy nudges his mother with a plastic fork that he finds lying next to her. She jumps with a start, like a Jack- in- the box, and shouts at him to fuck-off. He quickly scrambles away from her, in case the blows start to his head. Nothing. She only nods off again, leaning into the other monster that he calls dad, with the tattoo of a red and blue fire breathing dragon running up his emaciated arm.
Mouth agape, her head falls back. The boy can’t help it, he nudges her again with the plastic fork; this time a little harder. He wants to draw blood. She jumps this time like a rag doll being thrown in the air. She curls her lips, blacken teeth emerge. Claws with chipped red tips drag him out the front door by his matted lice infested hair.
As the beast, he calls mother, ties him to the tree, her pocked marked face spits at him, and her croaked nose drips snot, she tells him that he is now the family dog, and kicks him hard in the shin. He yelps like a dog, and curls up with his head tucked in between his knees, and wishes at that moment he could bite her and cause her pain.
He knows at that moment that monsters are real. They aren’t just in his comic books, but real, talking, chain smoking junkies, and one is his mother staring at him with snot dripping down her nose, and foul breath spitting at him. There is nothing wrong with the boy; only unlucky that the thing called mother pushed him out of her bloody hole.
**
He is forgotten on the hillside when the monsters flee. Like an abandon dog he is chained to oak tree by his waist. He is left with a bowl of water, and a homemade construction of card board boxes for shelter. Instead of a bone to chew on, he is left a bag of potato chips, and some ranch dressing. He is sold to the neighbor for a two blunts.
A social worker is called. The blonde haired “do- gooder” forgets to check and see if the boy is alright. The neighbor smiles and says he is the boy’s uncle. She forgets to check and see if he needs any help. If she had, she would have seen his bruises, and blackened shins, his broken big toe where the monster called dad had stepped on it with his steel plated boots.
She only needs to sniff the air in front of her to know he is unwell. His odor is of death, but the “do-gooder” took no notice of him as he sat on the couch with his head bent. He saw her behind his matted hair. He saw how she scribbled in her notepad, and left with out him in her blue Ford Escort.
The neighbor uses the boy like an old worn out mule. He is a portly man with a shaggy beard with squinty pig eyes who never says a word to the boy. He only points and pushes him in the direction he wants him to go. The boy stops talking. When the pig-eyed man slaps him, the boy responds with a series of yelps and barks—he forgets how to talk since there is no one who will listen.
When it’s raining outside the boy is brought in the shack to sleep under the neighbor’s bed with a flimsy yellowed sheet, and an old couch pillow, listening to the grunts and moans that come during the night above him. The door to the shack that the neighbor calls home is never locked. The boy could escape if he wants to, but where would he go, he has no shoes, and his clothes are rags, and he no longer speaks, he only barks and growls. The nearest town is twenty miles down the hillside road.
The neighbor feeds the boy, bits and pieces of meat, and stale bread. At least he is fed; at least someone is taking care of him. He gets a bath once a month when the neighbor pushes him in the slimy piss and shit creek that bunts up next to the neighbor’s property. And when the neighbor sees that the boy’s clothes are turning to rags, he gives him a white stained tee-shirt of his which hangs down to the boys knees. He tells the boy to tie some twine around his waist to keep the tee-shirt in place. But, still the boy has no shoes. His feet are blistered and his big toe on his left foot has not healed.
At night he dreams of dogs, packs of them coming to his rescue. He often wonders if he dreamt of dogs did dogs dream of boys. When he awoke, the neighbor is gone. The shack the neighbor called a house is bare—nothing is left for the boy except for a half empty coke can, and some stale potato chips, and the bed. The boy sits on the bare dirt floor eating the stale chips and sipping at the flat coke watching cock-roaches scramble for safety under the floor boards of the shack. In the distance he hears a dog howl, he howls back hoping someone will come to his rescue.
He hears scratching at the door; he scouts back, like a cockroach, under the bed, and pulls his yellow stained sheet over him. Three mangy dogs make their way in to the shack. They stand there in the middle of the room sniffing up into the room, and then, the leader, a female sniffs under the bed
She did not growl or bite at him, or reek of vomit and cheap booze, like the monster that had bore him from her bloody core. This female has a faint wet earth odor, but nothing as bad as he had smelt before. This mangy dog with almond eyes has been abandoned, like him by monsters that snorted and breathed fire. Monsters that slept during the day, and hunted at night, and fled when found out. One day the boy thinks, he will hunt these monsters down and destroy them just the way the good guys in his comic books do with their guns and knifes. His first one would be the monster who bore him, and then second would be the one called dad. The shaggy haired-pigged eyed bastard he will let live. But, the boy will make him crawl on all fours being whipped like all good monsters should be. And then with his pack of dogs he will search out the others.
The boy closes his eyes resting his head against the mangy fur of the dog. The blonde haired cunt will die too, for she neglected her duties, she had thought he was safe with the monsters, but the lazy bitch had thought wrong, and she too will die, slowly, feeling the pain as he did when the shaggy pie-eyed monster made him suck at his prick as if it was a pacifier.

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