He felt sorry for her.
He tried to say something but his lips were clumsy, his tongue unresponsive. But he was breathing slowly now. He thought of his faraway son, of Collin and Robert, of Olivia’s face when as a little girl she had begged for a sweet. Something like warmth but not warmth was pouring through his body. He seemed to sleep…
Lani shifted in her seat, and Lopez saw his daughter lying in her bed. Her chest rose and fell only a little. In the candlelight, her face was pale. Her chest rose and fell a little less, a little less. And then. Not at all.
Her skin began to shine.
Lani shrieked.
Lopez clumsily grabbed his wife’s hand. No llores, Nena. No llores. Don’t cry.
Olivia grew brighter. At first white, then faintly violet. She melted into a cloud of indigo.
Lopez fell back into his chair. The world at the periphery of his vision began to dim. His daughter drifted toward him and then over him, toward the window, toward her heaven.
The glory of her light, a shining universe in miniature, filled his vision. The baby girl he’d found drifting about the water pump. He hadn’t truly known why he had picked her up. Now he knew, truly knew.
The darkness at the edge of his vision gathered faster and faster, and so in his last moments, Joaquin Lopez marveled at his daughter’s luminosity.
I don’t actually write a lot of horror stories, and the ones that I do, I’m usually not aware that they’re horror stories when I’m writing them. I mean, sure, it may be a little dark. But most of the time, I’m just following some idea wherever it goes and seeing what comes of it.
Not with “Dogs.”
When Shawn approached me with the idea of Unfettered—total freedom to write whatever I wanted!—my initial thought was “Sure, I’d love to.” My second thought was “Well, I’m boned.” No constraints at all is a terrible way to start a project.
Eventually, I did find something, though. It was sparked by a couple conversations I was following online and a particularly grim study about sexual violence on college campuses. They came together in a single visual image, like a scene from a particularly unpleasant movie. And also as an idea.
In the old days, writers would sometimes write a story in public as a kind of stunt. I wanted to do something like that with this story, and Shawn—gentleman that he is—let me. So here in your hands is the final draft of “Dogs.” The whole process of building it is outlined at: www.danielabraham.com/2012/02/01/the-dogs-project-introduction.
On the up side, at least I knew going in that it was horror.
— Daniel Abraham
DOGS
Daniel Abraham
“Well, you’ve used a lot less morphine today,” the nurse said, tapping the feed with her thumbnail. “Keep this up and we’ll have you out of here by the weekend.”
“Go dancing,” Alexander joked.
“That’s the spirit, my man.”
The nurse adjusted something in the suite of machines beside the bed, and the low, chiming alert stopped for the first time in an hour. The sounds of the hospital came in to fill the void: the television in the next room, the murmur and laughter of nursing station shop talk, monitor alarms from all along the ward, someone crying.
“I’ll get you some more ice,” the nurse said, taking the Styrofoam cup from the little rolling bed table. “Be right back.”
He tried to say thank you, but it was hard to focus. His mind didn’t feel right, and his body was a catalog of pains that he didn’t want to associate with. They’d saved his toes, but in five days, he’d only glimpsed the complication of red flesh and black stitching that was his leg. The muscles of his abdomen were compromised. That was the word the surgeon had used: compromised. As if there had been some sort of agreement, some give-and-take. The fluid draining from his gut had seeped down, feeding deep, bloody bruises on both his thighs, and filling his scrotum until it swelled up to the size of a grapefruit, the skin tight, hot, painful, and discolored. Strangely, the punctures on his neck where the dog’s teeth had held him were the least of his injuries and the quickest to heal.
The nurse stepped back in, put the cup where it had been. Firm white foam holding crushed white ice.
“Up and around in no time,” she said.