Where is Home?
Where is the perfect place to die? A dog that once had dusty white nylon carpet-like fur but is now furless with blotches on its exposed skin. It belongs to a family that one can say lives in the back of the bush, near dirt road that officially does not exist but has nothing but footprints and tire tracks. A place where I used to walk my dog, Dimples, and would occasionally see the current subject racing around the yard, playing with the kids and moving between them like a streak of dusty lightning. It was fit and strong then. Now it was not.
Now, the dog spends its time everywhere but home. I pondered if the dog knew its days were numbered and wanted to spare its family the heartbreak. Or, if the dog understood the great injustice that had been done to it; their negligence that led to its decay in form. Therefore, it says within itself to never truly return home. Instead, it wanders and rests its head anywhere but the place where it was from; for it could no longer call it home and those people family. It no longer runs; it simply walks and only when it is fully necessary, jogs. It sometimes stands by the lazy swinging-fence that guards our driveway. The heavy gate drags against the ground unless lifted. The dog and I often lock eyes with one another. Those black eyes are emotional; there is a story there.
“You can’t help me aye?” the dog asks me every time it stops at my gate and locks eyes with me. But that is just my consciousness filling in a voice for my sympathy. If the dog could speak in a way I understood, we would talk for hours. But it doesn’t even bark these days.
My paranoid mother fears the mange will spread to Tiny, our newest dog, and our cat Jackson who bears a faint resemblance to the famous lasagna eating cat Garfield. So, we are under orders, from my mom, property guardian, to chase the dog off the premises. The creature has no place here. When the gate is open and there is no one to banish him away, he slumps down in our yard. When he is found and chased out, he rises to his feet in a limp stance. He looks at you with his dark, emotional-rich eyes. A silent plead with many words of foreign vocabulary but his dirty head, the only place with fur making it look like a ruined shawl, often invokes sympathy the longer you absorb his existence. Then, it would walk or trot away if you threatened violence.
If our gate is closed, it will find another domain to occupy. Sometimes he flops down on my neighbor’s concrete porch that does not even have a carpet. But it does not seem to mind. It lays down but never closes its eyes completely. It stares off into the distance, thinking about something—probably a place of serenity. Eventually, my neighbor comes home, or they always were home and open their door and shoo the dog away. The dog is always unbothered and limps away. Sometimes the dog is struck and yelled at for being an invasive species in registered plots of lands that he does not belong to. And once the person disappeared, the dog would re-emerge. It roams the street every day testing various porches and driveways. It wanders like a sorrowful ronin that seeks out a shogun that will never betray its unwavering loyalty again.
One of my neighbor’s dogs, who I call Black Momma, recently had puppies. She chased him to the passageway to the entry point to the back of the bush. He paused at the light pole and fence; two barriers that are close together with a moderate gap. The area is overgrown, and one must trudge through prickly, touchy green plants that make your skin itch but thank God they are not monkey tamarind. The dog stood at this entry point. It looked at the black furred mother streamlining toward him. It pondered which was worse; home or being mauled by a protective mother? Home, if it still considered it as such, seemed to be the least immediate danger, and he entered the passageway with his head lowered. The mother, now satisfied, returned home and soon after the dog emerged once more looking for a new place to rest its head.