There's a Good Dog...

By Chris Middlehurst

Meat trucks on fire and chiennes fatales. Sadistic toddlers and murderous bouncers. Television pirates and toilet wall haikus. Sarcastic sofa sellers and perverted policemen. In one word: England. Join Ezra the dog on a unique journey into the heart of an immense weirdness. A violent, hallucinatory and sometimes enlightening vision of the world seen through the eyes of a very strange canine mind, There’s a Good Dog… is the ultimate flipside of twee, family-friendly picnic adventures. Like a plate of frozen spaghetti or a road trip with a rabid grizzly bear, this experience will leave you shaking, spitting and howling by the end of it: unlike frozen spaghetti or a road trip with a rabid grizzly bear, you might actually end up enjoying it.

Are you sitting uncomfortably? Then I’ll begin...

• Language: English
• Publisher: AG Books
• Release date: Jun 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785387135

Book preview

coincidental.

Chapter One

Go on, son! Fetch the ball! Go on, son! Fetch! Fetch!

Get it yourself, you lazy bastard. Why do I have to do all the running?

Go on, Ezra! Go on, son! Go on!

Ugh. The pain.

I don’t remember running much. You might say I’m more of a streetwise kind of thing. A junkyard animal, perhaps. Though I’ve never been to a junkyard and I have no intention whatsoever of frequenting one. But you wouldn’t catch me running in fields of green or any crap like that, you know. For a start, I hate running. You might have guessed that by now. It’s bad for me, you see. Just like exercise, cats and cheap food. Gives me an allergic reaction and I get an awful pain in the side of my stomach and it only goes away when I stop, you see. Some people call it a stitch: I call it a fucking caesarean birth.

That’s it, you silly thing. Try and hold them all in your mouth, why don’t you?

Does he really think I’m that stupid? Can’t he see I’m trying to see how many balls I can fit into my mouth? He looks at me like I’m subhuman. Right, that’s it. Time to show him who’s the head honcho in this dirty playground. How many times must I remind him? Does he think I enjoy doing this? I stare back into his eyes and let out the biggest turd that I can manage. I thought my anus was going to snap into two halves like a knife slicing a melon and a giant hand peeling the two pieces apart slowly, carefully, waiting for the sound of the ccccrrrrrrrrrrr as the pieces slowly fall to the side of the chopping board. Snap! The short sharp crack of the wishbone of an overcooked seasonal turkey. My knees shake with the effort and my face twists into a triangular smile, the sides of my eyes stabbed by the cheekbones. My erection bobs up and down, poking against my belly and sending waves of electric radiation pleasure through my spine.

Ooooooooh. Yeeesssss.

I see him grimace with disgust and pull out the flimsy blue bag that he has kept in his sports jacket pocket the whole time we’ve been out. I want to laugh. He’ll need a bigger one than that that’s for sure. Either way he does it his fingers will smell of the stuff, even if he double-bags it. That’ll teach him to pick his nose when he thinks I’m not looking, the fool.

Aaaah.

Still haven’t finished. I feel a quarter of my body flop out onto the wet dewy grass. I almost have to stand on my front two legs to prevent myself from sitting in the stinking mound that I’ve made. I almost lose my balance and fall backwards on top of it but I’m an agile little thing you see and I gracefully bypass the turd by forcing the remaining three quarters of my body weight forward so that it looks to him like I’ve skipped out towards him so that he finally sees the giant brown hill that I’ve made. Ta da! Hey, arsehole! Look what I’ve done! Should I pose for the papers?

I sit next to it, my tale thumping up and down on the ground, tongue stretched out beyond my mouth as far as possible so that he thinks I just want him to throw the ball at me again.

In a way, I’m quite worried. That’s a hell of a lot of shit right there. What if I ejected some of my vital organs? My heart, perhaps? Nah. That tore out my rectum years ago. I wonder how much of me is left inside. There’s a hell of a lot of me that’s going to end up in his little blue bag. I almost feel protective of it now as I see him move his hands reluctantly towards the mound, the bag wrapped over them in a flimsy attempt to avoid getting them dirty. I feel almost protective of my dump now. Here you. That’s my pile of shit. Go pick up your own.

What you barking at, you dumb little shit?

You, you cunt. I bark back.

Here, you want to pick it up yourself, you mangy little cur, you?

That hurts my feelings, Greg. Oh well. I wag my tail at him to show him that he can say all he wants about me: I’ll never pretend to understand what he’s saying. Something red darts in front of me. A little blob. Ooh, a ladybird. I try to touch it with my nose but it smudges instantly. That’s odd. Ooh, there’s another one. Here, little ladybird, come and climb on my nose. I won’t bite. Yet. Here, there’s a good girl. There’s a good girl.

Aw. Smudged again. Is my nose as sharp as all it’s cracked up to be? I feel a tingling down the inside of my back leg. Is he tickling my balls? Oh no. Just a few more ladybirds traveling down my body. Must be nice, being a ladybird, but they keep smudging into the grass into little liquid blobs. Then they just sit tight and watch me with their microscopic eyes. Aren’t they supposed to move? I thought the little fuckers had legs.

Only when I look up do I realise. Those aren’t ladybirds. Greg is beating my back sunburnt red with the