Demons and Other Inconveniences

  *****

   At 5:30, I opened the door expecting hugs and wagging tail, but got squat.

  “Don’t you find that odd?” I asked my wife, hanging my jacket on a barstool.

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t move from the couch when I get home. Maybe something’s wrong with him,” I said.

  “He’s fine, honey. He played with the girls for the last hour. He’s just tired. Dogs nap–a lot.”

  “Still.”

  “Why are you paranoid he doesn’t love you? He’s just a dog.”

  He’s just a dog. I’m paranoid, I’m imagining things. I didn’t imagine him leering at me in the middle of the night. I don’t imagine him stealing my seat on the couch or moving towards her when I come to sit back down. There’s no threatening posture or growling, he just puts up with me until I go away. But he plays with the children and loves my spouse. Maybe I did something wrong.

  That night in bed, he made his slow patient journey. Normally, I woke with every movement only to put him back at the foot of the bed in a symbolic show of power, but this time, when I roused, he was face to face with me, almost nose to nose and staring with his wild eyes, as if daring me to move him. He had established position and wasn’t giving up.

  When I tried to move him, he growled. It was very low so as not to wake her, but I heard it. I was never afraid of a thirty pound dog…not until then. He was gentle and kind with everyone but me, and I’m the one who fought to bring him home. Little bastard. I scooped him up and lay him at the foot of the bed, growl or no growl. His eyes locked on mine, but he didn’t move, not then.

  I had decided to deal with him in the morning. I would go to the Petco and get him a bed of his own. We would live with some sleepless nights until he learned to use it. For now, I would put up with his bullshit and get some shut-eye. I heard a deep sigh from the foot of the bed as I started to drift back off, but I slept. I don’t know how long I slept before something woke me. A sound, a feeling, a presence.

  Wedge was lying on my chest and staring with those eyes again. I don’t know how long he had been there. His head was turned away from me but his eyes were racked back to look at my face, so far so I could see their bloodshot edges. What reminded me of a frightened horse at first now looked more like anger.

  “What is it, boy?”

  He stared.

  “It’s ok, boy. Go back to sleep,” I said nervously.

  My wife slept peacefully. He came again with the low growl, his thick gasket-like lips curled into a snarl that showed just a hint of tooth.

  “Calm down, I’m not gonna move you.”

  I could either put up with him or kill him and I was too tired for the latter. One thing was certain. The animal hated me and it showed in those eyes. My wife’s breathing was steady as she slept and though I wanted to wake her or at least look at her, I couldn’t stop watching him. He shifted his weight and moved his paws, crawling closer until his cold, wet nose touched mine, never losing his intensity. He sniffed my face and the growling stopped.

  He nosed around my eyes and then around my mouth. My forehead broke out in a cold frightened sweat while he completed the inspection, and all I could hear was the metered breathing of my spouse who was missing all the fun. I moved to sit up, to end the stupidity, to take the upper hand but he was on me, his eyes in my eyes, his breath in my face. I was paralyzed. Embarrassed by my fear, I felt my cheeks flush. A single tear rolled out of my left eye.

  That tear was his cue. It was what he was waiting for, my complete submission. The dog, or whatever he was, leaned in ever so gently and licked the salty fear-filled drop from my cheek. The first time he had licked any of our faces. I felt hot breath as he did so and smelled a stench of rot and decay, of hot blood, an odor that was decidedly not dog.

  He licked once more before centering his eyes back on mine. Then he drew in deeply through his nose, hungrily stealing my breath from me. I felt my lungs struggling for air and I tried to gasp for more but was easily outdone by the horrid Wedge. My last rational thought was that he had come home with us this way, that he’d had this agenda from the beginning.

  I cringed in pain as I felt my chest caving in, lungs burning, all while staring into death’s eyes. Those hollow eyes didn’t belong to my family’s pet, but to something else, something ancient and terrifying. As my wife woke up, she looked at me and I risked a glance at her, pleading for help, finding none. She, instead softly spoke to the dog as she stroked his head.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  ..ooOOoo..

  AMBER ALERT

  Do you worry about what you put into your body? You should…and if you really knew, you might move to the woods and start foraging.

  INSPECTORS ACCOUNT FOR things like rat turds, hairs, and insect parts. According to regulations, there are limits to which these items are acceptable in our food. Meat, however, is meat. Anson’s Processing processed, for the most part, beef. Occasionally there would be call for pork or poultry, even venison, but those were custom orders. It was mostly ground beef patties for grocery stores and restaurant chains. In all, Anson’s supplied hundreds of locations in the region and fed well over a million people. Jim Kinser worked there. He didn’t like it much but it was a paycheck.

  There was a running joke at Anson’s: Meat is meat, you are what you eat. It was posted on a sign that hung over the entrance to the break room—a handmade sign with the letters burned in by a soldering iron. Its craftsmanship was in fact, quite good.

  The folks who worked there didn’t take kindly to those of the vegan or vegetarian persuasion. The trend toward healthy eating, organic food and those vegans might have actually put a kink in the big business of meat packaging. Jim didn’t care. He walked into the break room that morning as always, half asleep and guzzling coffee.

  “Morning,” he said unaware if anyone was actually there to speak to.

  “Hey, Jim. Good weekend?” said Ray Case, a fat man, good-natured, smart and covered with hair, but his most notable feature was the fat.

  “Mmm,” was Jim’s reply.

  It was positive enough and Ray took it as if he’d said Yep, now don’t bother me, and moved along. Jim took his hard hat and goggles out of a small locker—same one he’d had these past seven years—and while he donned the gear, a flurry of sunshine named Margaret Spinnel whirled into the room. “Hey baby! You up for some guts this morning?” she said.

  “Hi Mag. No, no more than usual,” he replied.

  Jim was bone thin, and with the hard hat on, folks at the plant said he looked a bit like a mushroom just bustin’ through the soil. Next to Ray, everyone was thin, but Jim was skinny no matter who he stood by.

  Employees clocked in one by one and each pulled on his own disposable clean-suit and trudged into the plant’s innards to begin the day.

  Jim ran a saw that hacked the whole cows into parts, sides of beef and the like—sometimes smaller—depending on the order. It was messy and at the end of the day he stunk, but at least it wasn’t slaughter. Thankfully, that was done elsewhere at another facility north of town. Still, some of the organs were used at Anson’s to make sausages and meat spreads. All the stuff you’d never eat again if you saw the recipe in action. He put on his headphones for some tunes and covered them with ear muffs to drown out the wailing of the saw, and then hit the power switch. His world began to vibrate at 1,750 RPM.

  Classical music soothed him as the hooks began to move, bringing slabs of dead animal to Jim’s waiting hands, then to the saw’s waiting teeth and finally off to packing and shipping. That was how Jim Kinser got through to the weekend when he could be with Dana Abernathy, his girlfriend of almost two years.