The Life of Dogs

By Bethany Pope

In this brave new world there is no hunger, no war, no poverty or want. Humans live, not quite together, in a world united under the beneficial hand of unlimited consumerism. Decades ago a team of scientists created the E/MC, a device which transforms matter, specifically waste, into anything the user desires. It is a world which appears to offer nothing but bliss, but to a careful observer there are a few key things missing, there are no more dogs. They have vanished, along with other more human creatures. All artists; poets, sculptors, musicians, painters have halted their work. All creative activity has ceased. Now a journalist, is out to find out why. He is on a journey through a seemingly utopic world, determined to fan the flame of desire in a world where nothing is needed and no want remains. It is the end of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bethany Pope
• Release date: Nov 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465734105

Bethany Pope

A LBA winning author and graduate of Aberystwyth University's Creative Writing PhD currently living in England.

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The Life of Dogs

By Bethany W. Pope

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Bethany W Pope

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For: Spot, Maggie, Chalmers.

The Birth of Dogs

The Woman has no name, not one member of her clan does, names have not come into being yet. Words are spoken; words have always been spoken, in some form, ever since the coming of the Word that forced the world from darkness, the Word that forced the light. The Woman, who we will, for simplicities sake call Eve, lives a difficult life made easier by the fact that she does not know it. Her family travel through the plains, making the tools they need from day to day, curing hides, hunting, foraging and retaining few possessions. This is normal.

Things are hard, she struggles to find enough food from day to day to feed herself and her children, but she makes do, from the sweat of her brow. She has not yet discovered how to make bread, but she does grind the grain that she scours fields for in the basin and boils it inside of a skin held over the communal fire and filled with water. She eats the resulting gruel without flavor since she has not yet discovered salt, though the crystals surround her. She will, given world enough and time, but the land is still young, even if Eve is not, her species, still young, barely through the dawn.

Look at her a moment. Don’t worry, get as close as you want, she can neither hear nor see you. Your scent is covered in layers of time; you are, in fact, invisible. Look at her thick hair, she lets her daughter groom it and the adolescent five year old has plaited it so that it rises up like serpents from her head. See it shine? That’s the palm oil that her daughter used to dress it and to prevent the hairs from breaking.

She is familiar, isn’t she? She reminds you of someone in your family, your mother, perhaps, or your grandmother. Something about her eyes. The similarity has to be in the eyes because her coloration is wrong, she resembles no race walking the earth today though her skin is clear and healthy, her features have a thick look about them, somewhat rough, as though unfinished. She is like a sculpture still being formed.

See the stretch marks on her stomach? Though she would, by our standards, be considered quite young, she is barely twenty five, by the rules of her community she is leaving middle age. Her last child, the one she carried inside of her until two days ago, will be her last. She knows this and is saddened by it. She has had five all together of which only her daughter and her almost-man son survive. The baby she gave birth to the day before yesterday died last night, in her sleep. She woke with it blue and silent beside her on their skin this morning and she burnt the body in the fire and let the ashes scatter. By the reckoning of her people the spirit had not formed yet. Each child lost has scarred her and, because she cannot conceive of any sort of life after death, the scars have stayed fresh and close to bleeding.

Her breasts ache with useless milk. No other woman in her clan has had a child recently, although some are obviously expecting, so there is nothing for her but to wait until the flow stops. Until then her breasts will throb, and throb, with every beat of her heart.

This woman, this Eve, comes from a people who have only just begun to have a history. It happened, what the Tellers call the Great Wind, the dawn of true language, only a few generations before Eve was born. Her people emerged from a thin grey haze of rough existence into culture. Her grandmother, before she died, told of the coming of the great wind, after a storm, when there were fires in the sky, the sounds her people had always made began to form a meaning, and with the sounds, came God.

The people became aware. They looked into a silent river and saw themselves. And with this new awareness came the Word and the Word was the beginning, and the Word took the people and set them aside from all of the other peoples in the world, and the Word took Eve’s people and made them his own. And with the words, with the great gift, the knowledge that they were themselves and not alone, came prayer and the prayers were thanks, and only thanks because the people had not yet learnt to ask for anything.

But if Eve could ask for anything, if it could occur to her to ask for something, she would ask for the return of her child, for though she knows that she is gone, she yet yearns for her, for the smell of her and the weight of her body cradled in her arms. And some part of her did ask that, some part beneath the conscious level, that new formed part of the mind reserved for lies, asked for a baby.

And a baby was provided.

Now, you people, watching this lonely woman building a fire in the grass, watch what happens next.

Eve is always armed with something, all of her clan are always armed, for this land is as yet unmapped and there are monsters running loose. Eve herself watched a child, another one of her lost sons, be dragged away from her, taken from her very side by a large cat with enormous teeth. The creature still follows her in dreams, which she thinks of as her Other Life, and she spends nights fleeing from it, awakening to tired legs and worn-through leather bedding. She carries with her a sharpened knife hacked from chert and formed without a handle.

She is building her fire away from the others because she is about to cure a fresh skin. She makes her distance out of courtesy for the scent of tanning flesh is offensive, harsh and acrid from the ash and lye, although the acacia wood she burns cuts the worst of it.

Because her nose is blocked with smoke she does not smell the predator approaching her and the wolf stalks up behind her unnoticed, sure of its meal. The wolf is larger than the ones that you have seen in pictures, its breed has not yet found its final form, but it remains recognizable. It sees the woman crouching by the fire, rubbing the bloody buck skin, the source of the delicious scent that drew it, with a mixture of ash and the animals own pulverized brain. The fire is the only reason that the wolf has not struck sooner, she spent a long while hesitating in the bush until she figured out that it was contained and so not liable to spread.

The wolf approaches, stalking forward one foot at a time, each hind paw fitting perfectly into the print left before it, creating the impression left behind in the tracks of a creature walking on two legs. It moves to strike, but Eve has seen its shadow and she turns to meet her would-be killer face to face.

With her right hand out stiff before her she catches the she-wolf for a moment by the throat. She cannot hold the creature for long, it is large and full of strength, although not young. Eve does not know it but this wolf has just given birth to her last litter, her heats have ended and the two small pups that survived the birth are crouching in the bushes a few yards away, waiting for their mother to nurse.

The she-wolf struggle and if this fight had taken place a few generations before; she would have won and eaten well. But the Great Wind brought weapons to the people, along with words, and now Eve can protect herself. Struggling in the moments she has before her death, Eve takes her knife in her weaker left hand by the dull edge and brings it up until it catches the moonlight. She brings it down in one swift stroke and draws the blade, light as a leaf edge, across the throat of her attacker. The creature dies quickly, expelling her final sour breath into the face