from a linked sequence titled The Black Dog Stories

by George Murray

Something was wrong, different, but he didn't remember a thing. Tim woke suddenly but not fully, the way the drunk often do when it is an hour before the weekday alarm but Saturday morning: lying on one side, arm numb, staring at the red digits of his alarm clock. The room was dark, the light cut by the blinds not even moonlight, but a pale reflection of. The bed was hot with his sweat; perhaps he had a fever. He could feel the presence of his wife's heavy body behind him, sunk deep into the mattress, sleeping with the fortitude of drink. The party must have ended well, he thought, he didn't even remember getting home. At his feet a dog lay curled in an inky ball, a black hole in the dark. With waking came the return of scent, the musk of an overheated winter room overpowering his slow to recover consciousness; sweat, drink and dog. And sex, he thought. Yes, a good end to the party. His hands were sore.

I wish she were dead, he thought without thinking, and immediately regretted it. Why? he asked his mind. He lay still and reached out as best he could with his back to touch his sleeping wife; the less he moved, the less his head hurt and the closer he stayed to sleep. He could sense her in the dark, how she lay; on her back as usual, head propped slightly by a round pillow, one hand on her stomach, another sprawled out on the other side of the bed, as though pointing a way to somewhere. Her mouth would be open, chin tilted up like she was waiting for a kiss from above. Kiss. Kissing. Kitchen. Klean the Kissing in the Kitchen.

Tim could feel himself drifting back towards sleep so he rolled slowly onto his back and stared at where the ceiling would be if there was enough light. There was something he had to do, but he couldn't remember what. Clean up?

He hated it when his mind thought about things without his permission. It usually happened right before sleep, or right after, when he was on the border, one eye in, one eye out of slumber. It made him feel ridiculous and out of control, but mostly just stupid. It felt like someone was talking down to him from just inside his ear or behind his forehead, mocking. At his feet, he could hear the rise and fall of the dog's breath, the wheezing as it chased rabbits through its head, tore the guts out of rats with one paw as a brace. It's legs moved sporadically and minutely over the sheets, pads on its paws clenching and unclenching. Wait a minute, he thought, I'm awake. Something was wrong.

He squinted into the dark, peering around the bedroom, his head beginning to throb with the effort. He could barely see the low dresser at the foot of the bed, an antique, deep polished cherry wood, with a three foot tall mirror running its length. He had inherited it from his mother when she passed; it came with a note that begged him not to give it to his wife, but he did, knowing how much she had loved it. Now she kept all her stuff there: makeup, powders, papers for the office, bath salts, baseball glove, family knick knacks; messy, but clear enough for him to watch from the bed when they made love. He wondered if she knew he did that, wondered if she did it when it was her turn on the bottom. A weak reflection of the room's meager light was all he could see in the mirror now, just the hint of a room rather than walls and corners, just pools of darkness rather than a bed and bodies. In the center of the mirror was the dark shadow of a sticky note he had left her two weeks before; I Lurv You, in big letters. She said she would leave it there forever, and they had cleaned around it since.

The door to the hallway was ajar, a testament to the dog's tenacity; it was new, also inherited, but from a friend who died in the north country, and was still untrained to sleep on the mat by the door like their old dog. Through the crack Tim could see a deeper blackness, but the shadows were punctuated on one side by the slightest hint of light from the oven clock in the kitchen. Tim flexed his hands, his knuckles cracking softly and painfully. The kitchen.

Tim's eyes began to close and he may have slept, but was suddenly awake again. Something was missing. The light in the room had changed very little, the same shadows were waiting in the same places. He was on his back still, his sore head off the pillow but on the mattress and focussed toward the ceiling. His mouth was open and scale dry. He rolled slowly onto his other side, facing his wife where she lay just as he predicted; neck arched, mouth open, one arm on her stomach. Behind her was another window, and starlight as weak as the first, yet strong enough to make her a silhouette against the exterior, strong enough to rob her of every feature but line.

He lay looking at her for a moment, forcing himself to think of how much he loved her, how much their life together could have been good, wait, was good, just as he had expected from the beginning. A strong pulse of pain began in his hands and pushed up through his arms to his temples. Something was different about this hangover. Water, he thought and began to rise from the bed. Neither his wife nor the dog stirred.

Tim made his way to the washroom, stumbling down the hallway in the dark, passing the dark kitchen and ignoring all light switches in favour of memory. He stood in the bathroom, the light from the high tiny window stronger than in the bedroom, but still too weak for detail. He barely noticed himself in the mirror as he plunged his lips under the tap without letting the water run first. It was a warm fluid that tasted of metal. He drank long, the water cooling over time until his stomach began to protest and he cut the flow with a twist of the wrist. When he turned to leave, he caught his eyes in the mirror, puffed and dark, and for a moment didn't recognize himself. He started, the hair on his neck and arms rising, the temperature going up a quick degree as though someone had stepped near enough to him to pass on their warmth on to his chest and face but nowhere else. He rubbed his arms and moved as quick as he could through the door, back towards the bedroom. He felt groggy and disoriented, like he was lost in a replica of his own home, but where the dimensions of each room and corridor had been slightly altered, and where the light came in from the north or south rather than the east or west. He tried to shake himself of it.

Passing the kitchen he noticed the table had been cleared violently onto the floor, dishes broken, chairs overturned, drawers opened. He chuckled to himself; Passion. It must have been one hell of a party, he thought, we haven't made a mess like that in years. He flexed sore fingers at his sides. The light from the oven's clock cast long strange shadows on the shapes of bowls and pots. Dark lumps of food and liquid were everywhere. The cat sat licking at something on the floor. He shook his head, smiled and continued back towards the bedroom. Half way there something struck him as odd, different. Someone else was in the house, had been there for hours.

Tim's chest clenched as he woke fully. He moved quickly down the hall. Still drunk, his steps unsure, he banged into walls and off decorative tables. He reached the door to his room and opened it slowly. His wife and the dog still lay quietly in the bed, their shadows blurred into one in the lack of light. Tim moved to the foot of the bed and listened to the creaks of the house around him, straining for any sound that might be out of place. He could hear the breath of the dog, its slight wheezing, the creaks of the wooden beams that supported the roof settling, the slight clicking of branches and hiss of leaves from the trees and shrubs outside the windows. He looked at the black pool of the dog and then at his wife: the dog's chest moving silently, his wife. The dog breathing, his wife. The dog breathing. His hands ached and ached.

He moved to the foot of the bed and stepped in something wet. He retreated and his heel kicked something heavy and dead. He looked back to the bed and was amazed to see that the dog had opened a single eye, one that caught all the dim light in the room and focused it at him. It rose calmly from the bed, wagged its tail, and leapt into the hallway.

Tim looked down at his feet and saw another dark pool of body. Someone else was in the house. He raised his left hand and found a long kitchen knife in it; to protect himself he thought, to protect his wife. He began to blink, to try to clear his eyes of the scene, to wake up. The meager light of the room began to flash like an ancient movie and he staggered against the dresser, away from the body on the floor. He looked in the large mirror on the dresser. He could see the form of his body, but where his head should have been rested the shadow of his note. He looked at his right hand and saw something white. Raising it he found small kitchen garbage bags bunched in his fist. To protect himself?

The dog returned, slipping through the door and sitting contentedly in the pool of wet below the dresser. Tim looked down into it black eyes as it deposited the limp body of the cat at his feet.

George Murray is an editor at the Literary Review of Canada. His debut poetry collection, Carousel, was published by Exile Editions (2000).