Making Glucose Out of Death
Short Story Review: Killing the Dog by Frances Ray
I don’t know how to introduce Frances Ray’s story “Killing the Dog.” The story is beautiful and puzzling. It seems so clearly presented, but the more I read it, the more questions I have about what the story means emotionally. Give it a read at the link below before we dive in.
Link to story: http://ndrmag.org/fiction/2019/12/killing-the-dog/
The story begins strangely:
The apocalypse came, or so we figured. How can anyone be sure? It’s speculation, every time we shout Oh, God — The End! A working theory based on the available data, and here’s what we knew: the beautiful things turned ugly. Castles gave to their rotting frames, forest gave to pests, oceans to piss. Everybody got lice. Those with decency shaved their heads, and those without wore their lice proudly, like crowns. It was disgusting. How could we not say it was the end?
Our narrator vaguely attempts to explain why she, her husband, and their dog have left their home and headed to a cave in the highlands. Their row home has collapsed into the harbor. The grocery store has run out of “everything but greeting cards.” She mentions the pests, the rot, the piss. But are these exclusively indicative of an apocalypse? Surely there are other places in the world to escape whatever has happened in their hometown of Alexandria. Is there a greater phenomenon happening worldwide? What else has happened that would force them to such extreme actions?
For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, ice ages and burning wildwoods, collapses of economy and self-control…
Wife, husband, and their dog decide to start life anew in the highland cave. They scrape at the mossy walls with their long, growing fingernails, searching out water, testing and trying combinations of dirt, grass, metal screws, cigarette butts, algae scum. While the wife slowly crumbles under the pressure of this new way of living, the husband seems to thrive. He explores their surroundings. He reassures her when she’s visibly sad. He gathers food. He plays with the dog.
They do not eat the dog. This, it seems, is only because the husband wants to wait until the dog turns on them. He believes, for some reason, that “betraying such a loyal creature would spoil the meat.” Once the dog is ready to attack them, then and only then can they pounce.
“That’s when the meat is ready,” he said, rubbing my back in the cave, the dog curled up and warming our feet. “But tough. We’ll have to draw the sweetness out with fire.”
The wife doesn’t agree, but she eventually comes around to his point of view. This is something she always does. She always falls in line with her husband’s ideas. She is unsure of herself. She has too many questions. Her anxiety bests her, and so her husband takes over the helm. But she finds his loyalty to the dog strange. She describes his actions as only “postponing the inevitable with an outmoded sentimentality.” However, over time, she too decides not to kill the dog. To her, he is a “good” thing. He wags his tail, bounds, jumps, follows the husband to the pond. He senses the wife’s distress, her fear, the depth of her emotion.
Like I did at the beginning of the story, she also questions whether their decision to start fresh in the wilderness was wrong. What if the world hasn’t ended? What if this is unnecessary? But he reacts to her questions and doubts like she’s a child. She sees her mother in him, tender but dismissive. He attempts to dissuade her worries with reason, but she can’t come to terms and retreats further into herself and the cave. She soaks up the darkness. She cannot find a place to put her worries. She hides from the sunshine, from the ugliness that has spread across the landscape, across them. When she cannot sleep, he holds her in his arms and recites their wedding vows.
For better, for worse. When the land wrenches, when the sea writhes. In flayed nerves and decapitated hopes. Forever. This is my solemn vow.
She realizes that, while she has become hyper-focused on ugliness, her husband, it seems, has become focused on exploring his hunger. It motivates him away from the cave; it gives perspective to their plight. He is excited over every meal. He salivates, rubs his hands together, feasts on the rusted rubble they’ve found. He still even lusts after her (a different sort of hunger) and pulls her to him for sex. She recoils, unhappy, unable to extract her desires from the ugliness she sees in herself and around her. When he penetrates her, he tells her he loves her and that he’s fighting for them.
Eventually, the husband decides that he will go to their former town of Alexandria. He wants to “pay his respects.” He wants to make a “pilgrimage.” Perhaps there are survivors. Perhaps there are supplies and food to be found. His decision to do this makes her question him once again. Does he really believe the world ended if he wants to go back to see what is left? He snaps at her. Tells her that the world has indeed ended. Tells her that she needs to leave the cave and to stop asking stupid questions. That there are more important things to consider than whether or not there is truly a reason to be in this predicament.
As he moves out into the world, she retreats into the cave, exploring it until its very depths. Instead of wondering about her husband’s journey, instead of following after him to help, she indulges in physical sensations. She clutches at dampness and coldness. She savors the taste of magnesium, iron, and aluminum as she licks at her rock-touched fingers. Goosebumps crawl over her clammy skin. Her lungs “gill” out. She hears the barks of her dog as they echo along the walls of the cave.
When she reaches the end of the cave, she comes to a realization. It’s here that she realizes that there are no boundaries to her resolve. Now that she’s come to the end of the cave, now that she’s explored not only the cave but herself, she could, if she wanted, stay there forever. She could “wait a million years for the weak acids of rain to wean that boundary away and grant me another inch of perfect darkness.” But she decides to turn back because she doesn’t want to wait for that long and, plus, she’s already missed out on the ending of the world. She decides that, instead of waiting for more darkness, she must prepare for the next thing that happens.
“The world has ended and I can confidently report this as a misconception: hunger wants to be sated. No, hunger is a fist that wants to tighten and curl until it bleeds.”
When she emerges from the cave, the dog attacks her. She kills the dog easily, removing his teeth from her thigh. But she makes sure that we understand that the dog did not betray her. He merely mistook her for something else. She realizes this as she looks down at herself in the sunlight: a scabbed, hairless, desiccated creature. She makes sure that we understand that it was a matter of circumstances, not a true choice that led the dog to attack her. “Because I think it’s worth remarking all the minor glories and unbroken oaths we escape our lives with, I wish for whatever arises out of the detritus of this world to know that the dog didn’t betray me, not really,” she says. Why is this so important for us to understand? Why is this a moment of minor glory? Of unbroken oaths?
This could have been a moment of horror, terror, sadness, and guilt. But, instead, the story turns and changes. When she finally spots her husband on the horizon, trekking his way home to her, she is overcome with love. She is excited about their future. There will be so much for them to do, starting with burying the dog.
What did the dog mean to her? To the story? Was the dog a symbol of denying reality? She seemed to sense this at the very beginning, remarking on how the dog would be a logical choice for them to eat, instead of wasting time scraping between rocks for the tiniest morsels of moss and scum. Is her husband delusional? It was he, after all, who chose to keep the dog alive as a companion, who chose to continue swallowing screws, who chose to wander a supposedly dead world looking for community and provisions. Or is he correct to continue on?
Is the wife simply coming around, like she always does, to his point of view? Has she finally cracked under the pressure of their circumstances, rising from a place of skepticism and despair into a sky of golden-tinted delusion? Has he, like he posited would happen with the dog, drawn out love and sweetness from her under the pressure of fire?
Or is it that they both have been placed under such extreme pressure that their pessimism has transformed into an optimistic point of view? After surviving in a broken, ugly, hard world, has the sweetness of life finally blossomed within them?
He was beautiful, I realized, a thing that survived by whittling down to pure hunger. And at some point, I imagined, I hoped, he’d look up and see me, too: this ugly thing that, alongside him, would live forever.
Let me know in the comments what you think. What is your interpretation of the story? What, ultimately, does this story want to say? I can’t wait to hear what you think.
