Street Dog

By Ursula Vari

Charlie, a street dog in the city of Iquitos, Peru, is on his last legs, wandering into oblivion on the promenade, when a wide-eyed tourist notices him. Their supernatural chance encounter changes both their lives. See, hear, and smell the world through the true account of this seemingly broken street dog. Watch his life change as he is transfor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sylvanus Press
• Release date: Dec 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737979012

Book preview

PROLOGUE

You are born where you are born. That you can’t change. But what you can change is what you do with your life from that point on. You can follow the same old path your ancestors took, or you can carve a whole new path, a path with purpose. That’s what I did. I made myself be the chosen one, the one to lead my street kind out of hopelessness and homelessness. My purpose was to find a soul broken enough to see our own brokenness but with enough light to lead us out of our perpetual misery.

That’s how I met her. It was that time of the year when the Big River flooded again, when random frogs popped up by the feet of bewildered tourists, and the promenade—the Malecón, as we called it—became scented by Shipibo women and their agua de kananga–infused, thick onyx hair. It was also the time that I knew my body could not carry my soul too much longer. I knew I had a very small window of opportunity before the city and her old ways would devour her.

She was fresh out of the jungle. I could smell it. With her she carried the scent of walking palms and hierba luisa. Her legs were still tinted with the slightly bitter sangre de grado to ward off opportunistic insects and ticks, who did so much damage to my own system. I was ready to be rescued and taken off the street because my ways to change humans in that city weren’t doing much for my kind. I tried everything, from pleading in front of hotels to lifting my strong leg up and placing it on some bright-eyed tourist’s lap for food and a plane ticket to anywhere but there. I tried sleeping in front of numerous homes as a self-appointed guardian, hoping that someone would take me in, I tried sleeping in front of veterinary clinics—hoping to become the house dog—only to encounter dozens of cardboard boxes filled with yelping puppies that the locals had abandoned there. I tried romancing the fish vendor at the Belén Market, hoping she would take me home. Eventually I realized that thousands of my kind—street dogs—were scheming the same way, but only a handful of us would get lucky.

I was born to the streets, and that’s where I stayed for way too many moons, by the river of rivers—the Amazon. When I saw her on the Malecón, deeply embarrassed about the shape I was in, I tried hiding in my own charred skin. Yet she saw me, and I could feel her soul recognizing mine—and mine hers. She was to be my vessel, my vessel for my higher mission: to wake up humanity and save my own kind. I knew she would be my girl. Just when I thought it would be the last day of my life, just when I deserted the myriad possibilities in store for me, she appeared. Delicate, clear-eyed, she brought the scent of cinnamon and the magic of the jungle within her small frame.

But let me give you the full story of how it all happened.

1

THE CHANCE ENCOUNTER

It was supposed to be the last day of my life—or so I thought. The heavy rain spilled mud all over my aching body as I lay under the night guard’s post adjacent to the deserted boulevard. I have been roaming the streets for many years looking for food and chaperoning my girl, Pinky, while evading the dangers of motocars. I had my own little stretch on the Malecón, my own territory—that’s until the youngbloods moved in and took Pinky and my turf from me. The life of a street dog. I lived through eight wet summers, and this one got the best of me. I walked endless miles on the burning asphalt until my paws turned raw, searching for my own human. As time passed, my skin offered a perfect terrain for parasites that forged tiny volcanoes on my skin, and in time, I lost my glorious white coat to their havoc. It felt like my body was on fire all the time, and my uncontrollable scratching made everything infinitely worse—as did the motocar that crashed into my already weak body. I dragged my sprained hind legs, looking for food, but the youngbloods would always get to the freshly discarded trash bags first, leaving me with a vacuous, wailing stomach on the side of the road.

That day the rain came out of nowhere, and the sudden splash of cool mud hitting my body felt like a moment in heaven at first. It was a brief refuge for my raw skin. The guard post was no protection from the flash flood rushing downhill, carrying with it my ailing body almost into the Big River. The Amazon, with its grandeur, was to be my final, involuntary resting place—or so I thought. Covered in sludge and surprised to have lived through my sudden misfortune, I gathered all my strength to stand, only to recognize a familiar silhouette hovering over me with a menacing stare. El Gallo was at it again. This delinquent of a rooster was known to terrorize all of us strays, and now he was standing over me with his scaly, strong legs and spurs as large as medieval swords. I shrank to the size of a tadpole and slithered away, crawling up the hill as the sun’s first rays slashed into my already battered back.

Defeated yet again and in pain, I wandered around the perimeter for some time. The Malecón was already alive with tourists pouring into the city to find their life’s purpose through the Amazonian medicine plant, ayahuasca. Street vendors offering their tchotchkes and underage daughters were louder than the raucous motocars.

It took a while to drag my body past the trifling amphitheater and recently revamped fountain. One last time, I wanted to lie down and rest at my old spot by the white balustrade that separated the mystery of the Big River from the city’s indifference. I stood there on the concrete, too hurt to bend my knees and lie down, yet too weak to stand. I wished I could dissolve into the humid early afternoon or that someone would simply put me out of my hopeless state. The weight of my eight years and crumbling skin was too much to bear.

That’s when I heard her voice. She spoke a language at first foreign to me, but from her tone, I knew she was talking to me. She knelt down so she could hold my charred face with her small hands and looked me dead in the eye. Looking at her was like staring into the vast ocean of love, and I fell right through her irises. I pleaded with her without words, leaning my face into her palm. Help me or help me cross the rainbow, I grunted as her eyes welled up with tears. I will come back for you! she said in the language of the heart. I believed her, unlike the other adventurers who came before her, making promises in their altered states. See, I met thousands of tourists through the years, but she was different. She needed someone to belong to, just like I did. She was not comfortable among her own kind, and it wasn’t only because of the way they were all staring at her embracing me, a mangy, down-on-his-luck street dog. It was simply because her heart was made differently. By looking at her, I didn’t see where her heart ended or where it began, for she was all heart, with hers continuing into the heart of hearts, into Creation. As for me, I knew that heart. For I had hers before, and she had mine.

I stood there, pegged to the asphalt, as she walked away with her oversized backpack. A few minutes later, I saw her translucent eyes again, and in her hands she cradled a well-meaning plate of beans and rice. Street dogs don’t eat beans and rice; we eat chicken and bones that we cull from the roadside trash, but that she didn’t know. I saw hope on that plate, chicken or not. I gulped it down. I could barely breathe, I ate in such haste, dizzy from hunger and dehydration. She was polite, she waited for me to finish with the meal, then rested her small hand on my charred forehead while the other held my chin. I will come back for you! she said again as she gazed into my soul with such love that my body became light. I could feel my legs quiver as if about to take off and levitate. The tremendous light beam her heart emitted dissolved all worldly boundaries, and for a good moment, all my pain and the heaviness of years spent on the street perished. Then all went black.

When I came to, a net surrounded my broken body, and she was nowhere. I didn’t know how much time had passed since the moment she gazed into my soul—a few hours, maybe days, or weeks, even a month? I didn’t know, but time does not have significance in my story. Timing does. I heard the alarming sound of a motocar, but this time I wasn’t its casualty, I was a passenger. Net or no net, I was curled up on its bench alongside a young man who had a tight grip on the net. Pretty soon I was in a white building, with people wearing all white, amid the cries of puppies. Then the stream of cool water against my skin and the kind hands of a lady in her fifties smelling like Sunday fiestas. She dried me off, then wrapped me in a soft blanket, as soft as my queen Pinky’s hair, then rested my frail body on a couch in a quiet room, away from the noise of the city of indifference.

The lady sat with me for a while. It was the first time I wasn’t harassed to move, the first time I didn’t have to watch my back, the first time without the looming danger of motocars, the first time a human sat with me and held me as if trying to redeem her own kind, as if trying to say, I am sorry that we broke our promise of friendship. See, I wasn’t mad at humans; they just do what they do in their conditioned and disconnected state. Us dogs, we are just here to remind them of and connect them back to their godly qualities that they have forgotten: those of loyalty, unconditional love, forgiveness, joy, and the thrill of living in the moment. It’s really that simple. We are just messengers. Sometimes we get through to them, sometimes we don’t.

I thought about my girl with the indigo eyes. Where did she go? I remembered her infinite heart and her sweet, spicy scent. Yes, they did give me a spa treatment of a bath, but they couldn’t wash the scent of her skin out of my nose. I knew she was somehow behind this sudden change in my luck. I also knew that I would see her again. For I had her heart and she had mine. That night I slept like never before. Safe. For the first time in my life. On a couch, by the lady with the scent of smoky Sunday fiestas.

I didn’t know how much time had passed, but I awoke with a smile on my face because I had dreamed of her. In my dream her whole plan of action was laid out in front of me with the tiniest of details: her plan to rescue me. After she held my face in her hands for an eternity and gave me that instant jolt of otherworldly light, the surge of energy from it all allowed me to wander for a couple of more days in a strange daze on the Malecón. I didn’t see her speed away from me, from all the light she projected, but in my dream, I saw her rushing to the airport, as she only had an hour left before her plane was to take off for the city of Lost Angels. She almost missed her flight because of me. In my dream I saw her talking to a handsome mestizo man from my city who wanted to capture her heart, but I was already in it. She couldn’t stop talking about me, the mangy, dying dog on the Malecón.

By then she already had a name for me—Charlie, a far stretch from my name on the street, El Rey, as they called me in my prime. The mestizo man at some point went as far as asking her, Open your heart to me, to which she just smiled and kept asking the young man for his animal lover friends’ information in the city of indifference. By the time her plane landed in Lima, her notebook was filled with scribbles of names and emails of people she had never met in the local rescatista community. As she sat at the airport café for her four-hour layover, she had already looked them up on social media and sent them messages with my deprived photos, asking the strangers to find me and offering them money for my veterinary treatment. On the plane she sat in prayer, summoning all angels to keep me safe until my rescue. I will fate it, she thought. She already knew that it would be done. In her heart she already saw me living in her home in the city of Lost Angels. For I had her heart and she had mine. I saw her arriving in her city on a busy Monday morning. I saw her rushing through the airport to get home and see her other canine friend, and she apologized to her for letting me in her heart. Then she spent the rest of her day writing more emails to people she had never met and never would—all in the hopes of finding me, that mangy down-on-his-luck street dog, and fulfilling her promise and furthering my own mission: to save my kind. In my dream I saw tears streaming down her jungle-kissed, glowing face the next day, for I was found. A young woman by the name of Tanith notified her that she had encountered me and had her friend Joel trap me and that I was safe at a clinic and had commenced my new life. Her love knew no limits, no borders, no language barrier, for she spoke the language of the heart, though thousands of miles away, yet connected through the invisible web of compassion and the love of many lifetimes.

When I awoke, there was a plate of food in front of me. I stared into