The Good Pup - A Short Story

By Bridget McKenna

A summer rainstorm, a speeding car, and all that’s left for Romer Wills and his family is to build a coffin and hold a funeral for their beloved Pup so the children can feel they’ve done the proper thing. And that would be that, but three nights later something scratches at the door. Pup has come back from the dead, and with him have come happiness and rejoicing, trouble and sorrow, miracles and dark deeds.

The Good Pup was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Short Story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in March 1993.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ravenscourt Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507026960

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The Good Pup is copyright © 1993-2013, Bridget McKenna, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.

The Good Pup was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in March 1993.

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Contents

The Good Pup

Dear Reader

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Writing The Good Pup

About Bridget McKenna

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Copyright Page

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The Good Pup

ROMER WILLS HAD this pup—a good pup—and he and his family were mightily attached to it. I was there through the whole thing; through the pup’s life and death and everything that came after, and though trouble and sorrow were a part of it, there was also happiness and rejoicing, so who’s to say what happened wasn’t a good thing after all?

A stray bitch dropped the pup in Romer’s barn one chilly spring night during calving time, then disappeared leaving her get behind on a pile of dirty straw in an empty horse stall. Romer’s twins, Annie and Elvis, and Romer’s wife, Margie, took to bottle-feeding the little thing around the clock, which annoyed Romer some, as he could have used more help around that time.

I was the only hand on the Wills farm that year, and Romer and I did all the rest of the calving and picked up the slack on some of the other chores, too, until the pup was weaned.

Just my goddamned luck, Romer would grumble from time to time, to have the whole family wasting their time wet-nursing a dog we probably ought to have drowned outright. That sounds harsh, I know, but it was Romer’s way to talk like that sometimes, and he never did mean a thing by it. Nobody ever drowned anything on Romer Wills’ farm, and that was more than could be said for most of his neighbors—the ones who’d be around later waving Bibles and quoting scripture. Eventually, Romer had to admit that he was a fine pup and might amount to something someday, which was his way of saying that he liked the pup a lot.

The pup never had a name, at least not one that stuck, and finally we’d all called him Pup for so long there didn’t seem to be much point trying to call him anything else. He got weaned, got bigger, and got to be a part of the family, and that would probably have