She, Who Loves Dogs

By Kim Matics

The novel She, Who Loves Dogs tells the story about a young widow who must shelve her personal difficulties during the Age of COVID and embrace a totally different life-style for her young son and herself. While in Thailand, she faces many challenges, including saving the lives of countless dogs and other household pets abandoned during a large flood. Then she must reckon with the threat of becoming blind in a foreign land. Will she meet any kindred spirits to help her confront the enormity of her daunting trials? Or will she become overwhelmed by unhappy relationships in the past, anxiety in the present, and an uncertain future?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kim Matics
• Release date: Nov 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215009383

Kim Matics

Kim Matics, formerly a university lecturer in New York and Pennsylvania, experienced a dynamic career change decades ago when she became involved in rural development projects in Asia. After extended stints in Cambodia and Thailand, her most recent assignment found her employed by an international organization headquartered in Malaysia.Known in literary circles as Kim Matics, the author is a writer of fiction with a flair for Asian art history and cultures. Winning a series of competitive scholarships paved the way to teach Fine Arts courses at the university level. After a hiatus from full-time teaching to continue postgraduate research at University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the Anglophile headed for Thailand armed with a full-year Asian Study Grant. Subsequent affiliations with intergovernmental projects led to prolonged employment in the Far East, South Asia and Southeast Asia (particularly Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore).Fulfilling a long-standing academic interest in Asia and its diverse cultures, the author prepared a series of five academic monographs: Wat Phra Chetuphon and Its Buddha Images [selected by the Tourism Authority of Thailand as required reading prior to certification for Thai English-speaking tour guides]; Introduction to the Thai Temple; Introduction to the Thai Mural; Cambodian Silver Animals; and Gestures of the Buddha [reprinted four times and short-listed for distribution to foreign dignitaries attending the royally-sponsored cremation of the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand in December 2015]. The wordsmith has also produced scores of peer-reviewed papers for academic journals, as well as popular articles concerning Asian art and culture.As a writer of fiction, Kim Matics is known, to sometimes disparate audiences, for quite different kinds of literary works (i.e., novels, short stories and poetry).For instance, during the course of 2014-16, Kim Matics launched The Odyssey Trilogy comprising stand-alone novels whose themes and characters are intricately linked, although the venues differ:• Behind the Folding Fan [2014] set in Japan;• Revolving Doors [2015] explores parts of Thailand; and• Something Else Again [2016] takes place in Paris and southern France.A stand-alone novel entitled, Going Places, Letting Go [2017], describes life in Sea Cliff on the northern shore of Long Island in the shadow of New York City, among other locales in Europe and Asia.A duology begins with the novel, Kindred Spirits [2019/20]. Set in Japan, it explores aspects of acculturation from the West to the East and vice versa. Borrowed Scenery, Borrowed Time [2021] is the sequel.The novel She, Who Loves Dogs [2024] tells the story about a young widow who must shelve her personal difficulties during the Age of COVID and embrace a totally different life-style for her young son and herself. While in Thailand, she faces many challenges, including saving the lives of countless dogs and other household pets abandoned during a large flood. Will she allow her unhappy past, anxiety in the present, and an uncertain future defeat her?As for the series of short stories, What’s the Story?-1: East-West Works of Fiction, Based on Actual Events [2022] comprises an anthology of forty-four short stories composed over the years the author has lived in both the West and the East. The wordsmith relates specific stories concerning the culture of seven countries in South and Southeast Asia, as well as the Far East.What’s the Story?-2: Tales/Novellas in Major/Minor Keys [2023] comprises a second anthology of more than thirty short stories (and tales within tales), as well as novellas linking historical facts and anecdotal perceptions made in tandem with the author’s day-job that necessitated considerable traveling throughout Asia, Europe and North America. The intrepid author presents snapshots of the life and culture observed in eight countries in the Western world and Southeast Asia, as well as the Far East.

Book preview

She, Who Loves Dogs

By Kim Matics

She, Who Loves Dogs

By Kim Matics

Copyright © 2024 Kim Matics

Smashwords Edition

All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters and other elements are either the product of the author’s imagination or else used only fictionally. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or to real incidents, is entirely coincidental.

Front cover design by Tana Lertpongthai adapted from a painting by Marion Leonidas Matics: She Loves Them All (38 x 48); and Back cover painted by the same artist: Dog Walker (30 x 40)

Contents

Half-Title

Title Page

Copyright Page

Synopsis

Chapter 1: Ambivalent Grief

Chapter 2: Suddenly, A Qualifying Widow

Chapter 3: Rocky Reunion

Chapter 4: Birds Tap-dancing on the Awning

Chapter 5: Walking on Eggshells

Chapter 6: Breakfast Blues

Chapter 7: The Time of Singing Cicadas

Chapter 8: The Compassionate Vet

Chapter 9: The Great Flood

Chapter 10: They, Who Love Dogs et al.

Chapter 11: Look at the Light!

Chapter 12: Life on Hold: Under House Arrest

Chapter 13: Girl in Dark Glasses

Chapter 14: Living Again

Chapter 15: Short-term Consultancy

Chapter 16: The Actual Consultancy Commences

Chapter 17: The Animal Medical Center and Rescue Service

Chapter 18: Exhale the Past, Inhale the Future

Dedication

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Synopses of Earlier Novels

Critiques of Previous Works of Fiction

Partial List of Recent Publications

Contact Points

Synopsis

The novel, She, Who Loves Dogs [2024], tells the story about a young widow who must shelve her personal difficulties during the Age of COVID and embrace a totally different life-style for her young son and herself. While employed in Thailand, she faces many challenges, including saving the lives of countless dogs and other household pets abandoned during a large flood. Will she allow her unhappy past and uncertain present defeat her?

Chapter 1

Ambivalent Grief

What a pity it is to settle for second best, unable to carve out a future with one’s first choice. Marybeth mused, More’s the pity when you continue to see your Significant Other on a regular basis – on the street, at the local bank and market place, then at mutual gatherings in the close-knit community. On each occasion, whenever she observed his sky-blue eyes, it felt like an adulterous act, although there is never any physical contact, nor has there ever been.

Marybeth’s thoughts continued, How lamentable to see your first true love on a regular basis in your dreams. Her mind had the annoying habit of allowing Michael to pop up in different dream sequences – on the university steps, or at the pharmacy, or at a sports event in their village, where, in that illusionary fantasy world, they lived, but not with each other.

After awakening from each dream encounter in some mundane situation, merely witnessing his smiling face felt forbidden, although no physical contact occurred in the dream, nor had they shared any intimacy as undergraduates. Michael had always been the aloof, unattainable Significant Other. Nonetheless, Marybeth had the inkling, perhaps it was even a premonition, when she met him the first time, of knowing instinctively that she would fall in love with him. He was the Chosen One, who hardly gave her the time of day. However, whenever he did notice her, Marybeth tried to make the most of it, in her fashion.

Years ago, Marybeth rued the day when she subtly informed him that she loved him. Michael immediately embarked on a fierce diatribe. He objected to her strict, religious background, including her strait-laced parents and other close family members, all teetotallers. Michael forgot that she was her own person.

At an early age during his rebellious adolescence, he intentionally turned away from the homespun faith of his upbringing. While in college, he deliberately avoided anyone having a firm base and a guiding faith to sustain them throughout life’s vicissitudes. Michael derided Marybeth for her own solid anchor, but she was unapologetic for maintaining her ground of being. Ergo, Michael flatly rejected her and refused to join Marybeth’s life journey.

Months later, long after Michael’s sudden outburst, Marybeth suspected she might have been the last female he dated for any length of time. She observed how he intentionally, perhaps to spite her, carried on a series of affairs with other men. Habitually he played one off the other, but now Michael felt committed to one young man, albeit they had not married legally, as yet. Marybeth suspected it would only be a matter of time before the same-sex couple did so, considering the advantages of having a stable relationship instead of practising promiscuous sexual acts with multiple partners on the fly.

Therefore, Marybeth had to settle for an alternative lifestyle, as befits being one’s own person. However, something was definitely missing in her life.

She often recalled an insightful discussion with one of her elderly professors who privately discouraged his female researchers from getting married and raising a family and, as a consequence, tended to neglect their initial scholarly pursuits. He once let his hair down during an exclusive seminar. Perhaps he did not mean to, but he told the five female graduate students, Love is like a fish hook; when affixed inside the heart, it can’t be ripped out.

Well, Marybeth’s fish may have got away, but the tenacious hook of unrequited love remained deeply stuck in her being. With each chance meeting and parting in subconscious dreams, that hook tugged on her beating muscle. Each encounter further wounded her throbbing heart, causing additional scars to cover old ones.

As a result, she felt trapped; there seemed to be no escape from those obsessive nightmares involving some unsatisfactory assignation with Michael. She could not deny the rapid rise and fall of her pulse. It shook her frail frame to the core. Such strong palpitations often woke her up. The festering wounds never healed, long after she settled for an alternative spouse met a few years later in graduate school.

Numerous predatory females had flocked around Jim, probably because they found it intriguing to meet a tall, slim male who neither smoked nor got drunk or engaged in social drug parties. The potential family man, who claimed to like the children he taught before entering his doctoral program, seemed a viable matrimonial prospect.

However, a few of Marybeth’s female colleagues found it strange why some lucky girl had not snatched him up earlier as an undergraduate or when he taught in a Middle School. Marybeth assumed that Jim focused on his academic studies, intending to make something of himself, when most of his classmates skipped their lectures to play with the affections of fellow students, either women and/or men.

How ironic it was when Marybeth’s husband insisted on settling down in the identical community where her former love, but never lover, lived with his present male partner.

Chapter 2

Suddenly, A Qualifying Widow

Mrs. James Rhinehart, also known to family and friends as Marybeth, suddenly realized that she had been a widow for twenty-six months. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) classified her as a Qualifying Widow since she had remained unmarried for two years since widowhood. Moreover, she had one dependent, her young son, named Ralph.

At the age of thirty-four, Jim Rhinehart died unexpectedly in front of his wife and several hapless onlookers. The extreme allergic reaction, found to be lethal in one of a thousand persons, could have killed anyone, if they had some preexisting medical conditions. However, the man who died moments after receiving the third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine was Marybeth’s spouse, not somebody else.

The mandated third vaccine suddenly made Marybeth a widow and her young son Ralph a father-less child.

On a daily basis, the bereft widow railed against the unnatural COVID-19 for Jim’s untimely demise. She was convinced that a military team of bio-weapons researchers manipulated an existing lethal virus to make it more deadly to humans. She failed to understand who would intentionally create a more lethal virus from an already fatal one?

It was only a matter of time for sloppy laboratory practices on the other side of the world to exacerbate those bizarre gain of function procedures. Some mishap risked the lives of millions of people. The new COVID-19 virus spared no country. Everyone she knew had lost at least one or two beloved relatives, friends and acquaintances. That scenario was replicated all over the world.

In particular, Marybeth condemned the third vaccine against highly contagious COVID variants. Unsuspecting patients agreed to accept the vaccine due to the perpetually perceived emergency conditions touted by the mainstream media and bureaucratic, unelected government officers who claimed expertise they did not actually possess.

To be fair, most willing recipients felt fine after the third dosage of the vaccine. Only a handful of others experienced severely painful migraine headaches, extreme lethargy, unusual rashes and other unforeseen symptoms that hardly showed up during limited trials. Amazingly, in 2023 it was revealed that the governments administered vaccines that never figured in the trials, so in fact, all the recipients had been guinea pigs accepting poorly understood vaccines, whose quality and stability had not been verified when administered.

Yet, within less than seven or eight minutes of receiving the third vaccine shot, Jim died from severe cardiac arrest. Moments before his tragic demise, he appeared and felt healthy and strong. Little did anyone realize that Jim had a latent heart murmur due to suffering from rheumatic fever as a youngster? Unbeknownst to the researchers, Jim somehow survived after receiving the first and second vaccines, albeit he felt lousy for months, the worst of it during the first month. He did not realize that one clue for his feeling very heavy and lethargic was due to the formation of blood clots throughout his system. COVID-19 and the vaccines to prevent it was not really a respiratory disease, instead, it created overlooked blood works problems.

This is why so many young people, considered perfectly healthy prior to receiving the vaccine, suddenly experienced heart attacks and/or strokes, some fatal.

Undertakers noticed a peculiar clue in the blood works of corpses prepared after the Age of COVID: the blood in the veins throughout the body coagulated in a strange way, like long, stringy worms. This was rare before the Age of COVID, but immediately medical officials and the ubiquitous media debunked the unusual observations of funeral directors because, what did they know? They did not have a M.D. after their names.

Officious spokespersons claimed, without evidence, that the post-COVID vaccine corpses had been left in refrigerators for a long duration. However, many of these cadavers were not refrigerated at all due to the fear of contamination from the dreaded disease. The corpses were cremated in an unseemly quick fashion; even relatives were only made aware of the deed after the fact. To many mourners, this raised a red flag, as if something untoward was being hushed up or covered up. However, no one could voice their misgivings aloud, for fear of ostracization or worse.

•   •   •

It was the third dosage that did Jim in, and he died in an undignified manner, writhing in excruciating pain on the clinic’s white-tiled floor. A bevy of impotent nurses, unable to relieve or mitigate his extreme suffering, looked on aghast. A few proactive orderlies rushed away seeking a physician. Yet no doctors appeared in time to witness Jim’s wrongful death.

In hindsight, Marybeth recalled how Jim often remarked that taking the mandated series of vaccines was akin to playing Russian roulette with their lives. Out of a thousand doses, one person might die from the potent mixture that pharmaceutical companies perpetually labeled as experimental and for emergency use only to protect and spare them from expensive legal suits.

Yah, tell me about it! Marybeth thought ruefully, knowing that she and her young son had no recourse. Killer lawyers of Big Pharma ensured that no bereaved mourner could sue their billionaire clients for millions of dollars. Drug barons, benefitting from increasingly bulging bank accounts, were safe and completely above the Rule of Law. Any grieving relatives of insignificant participants in the emergency experiment, who happened to die from an adverse reaction triggered by the mandated vaccine, be damned!

•   •   •

Back in late January 2020, both Marybeth and Jim were early victims of COVID-19. At that time, baffled physicians were uncertain what to call the strange influenza-like malaise that brought patients so low, so quickly. Attending doctors, suited up in protective garments as if they were astronauts on Mars, actually misdiagnosed the couple’s mysterious illness as a variant of the earlier known Avian Flu. They sent Jim and Marybeth home with a week’s supply of Hydroxychloroquine pills.

Those pills did the trick for Marybeth. She recovered in five days’ time, albeit in quarantine from her ailing spouse confined to another part of the small house. A kind neighbor looked after Ralph, their healthy and lively toddler, even though he was into everything due to intense curiosity.

Jim required more than two full months to recuperate, but at least he survived his severe breathing difficulty precipitated by the fracturing of tiny blood vessels in his respiratory system, especially his weakened lungs. With each passing day, he felt heavier and more listless. However, he was spared from returning to the overcrowded hospital ward.

Marybeth had known acquaintances and colleagues whose physicians prescribed very expensive ventilators, expecting that the machines would ease their breathing, only to die in the early hours of the morning when no nurse or orderly happened to be present in the ICU ward.

Only several years later was it discovered that ventilators caused undue pressure in the lungs. They adversely affected the vaccine’s propensity of breaking blood vessels. However, the couple failed to heed such warnings, partly due to the lack of pertinent information online, and, due to the strictly enforced Lockdowns, other kinds of communication remained at a minimum.

By then, the couple felt obliged to conform to rigid Lockdown measures imposed by the government. They were not even permitted to attend any wakes or crematory ceremonies for deceased friends and associates. Had they been allowed to learn about the actual circumstances of the deaths by ventilator of their acquaintances, they might have become wary of accepting the mandated series of vaccines.

They became hermits inside their small house. The trio rarely ventured outside in the fresh air, except to stroll in their high-walled back garden.

They would never saunter along the front public street unless they were seeking food provisions. The government was very strict about the kind of errands permitted: they could only shop for food and other necessities. Week by week, the couple observed how fast the grocery supplies kept dwindling, as fearful neighbors hoarded crucial products that soon became non-existent. This was because factory workers no longer turned up, partly due to illness and the imposed Lockdowns. In addition, the scanty supplies proved woefully insufficient when so few employees came to work to meet the increasing demands for goods. In addition, the supply chain became ineffective when only a handful of truckdrivers felt willing and physically able to transport products to distant destinations throughout the country.

The couple continued to work from home, but with piecemeal assignments drastically curtailed. Frankly, the tasks on hand were uninteresting. Nonetheless, the dutiful parents spent quality time with their growing toddler and each other to while away the lengthening hours of each dreary day during the seemingly unending series of mandated Lockdowns and imposed curfews. To them, time expanded and seemed much longer than ever before. Their only respite was bird-watching in the back garden, a hobby enjoyed by the close-knit trio: Dad, Mom and Sonny.

•   •   •

Pressured by the urgency of the mounting pandemic and public panic, the federal government rolled out the initial experimental vaccine without lengthy testing trials on