Dogworld

By Josie Frazier

When I was ten years old my mother showed me a video of a little kid being attacked by a dog. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, watching the tiny phone screen in her hands. The gnashing teeth of the dog made me flinch and she wrapped her arms around me, like she was protecting me from something. It was almost like she knew what she was doing. In her embrace, I felt her pretending. But then again, maybe I was just pretending to be a child. For months after that, every night I would hide in my bed and play the video over and over again, watching the bite of the dog, the scream of the child. It was terrifying until suddenly it became comforting. The dog became like an old friend I visited every night, and the child someone I couldn’t quite understand yet.  

The day I graduated high school I went for a walk. I had grown out of the video like I had grown out of sparkly pink dresses and telling my mother all my secrets. A dog, big but yappy, approached me. There was something about this dog that felt so familiar. Nostalgic, but uncomfortable. My fear was suddenly renewed. I felt my heart beating frantically against my ribcage, telling me to run run run. It was as if I were a newborn, looking into the eyes of a strange beast for the first time. It was as if the dog was a known murderer, torturer, now my own personal tormenter. It was haunting; it was a ghost from my past. When I came home that day I found my mother in the kitchen, staring blankly at some magazine she must have bought in a grocery store checkout line. I asked her what the point of it all was. I didn’t exactly know what I was referring to when I said it all, maybe life, maybe graduation, maybe dogs. She said it was a personal decision, and for her it was motherhood. And how could I believe her? I told her I didn’t, and she stared at me with her big blue eyes. I recognized it as the look of a victim. She went to bed early, and I sat alone staring at the yellow cake with chocolate frosting she had bought me that said Congratulations on it in pink frosting letters. The next day I screamed at her for going to bed early, and she told me I couldn’t be mad at her for wanting to rest. I waited until she turned around and then threw a spoon at the back of her head. My mother called it being emotive, my therapist called it being abusive. I preferred not to call it anything at all. 

And then I had the dream. I woke up in front of a mirror, gold framed and Victorian looking. I found a chocolate lab with a tired, serious face staring back at me. I tried to scream but I couldn’t. My head was a dog, my body a woman. I could wiggle my human toes, feel my human heart rattling in its cage, even hear it with my big dog ears. My mother appeared behind me, her skin pale and ghostly. She looked at me like she didn’t even know me. Like a stranger, like a dog. When I woke up in the morning I went into my mother’s room with tears in my eyes and snuggled into her bed. She didn’t even ask me why I was crying, just wrapped me in her arms and pet my head. I tried to convince myself there wasn’t a spoon shaped indent in the back of her head, and that two nights earlier we had eaten cake together on the back porch. I asked my mother if she remembered that video she showed me eight years earlier, about the dog attack. Then I asked her if she thought I was the child or the dog.