I step onto the road, lower myself and wait. The smell of fuel suffocates the air as the car’s roaring grows louder and louder, closer and closer. I feel blood rushing to my limbs, as if I’m preparing to leap into the darkness. My ears stiffen, I sit up in anticipation, and my bones vibrate with stale patience. This is it. I exhale and run towards the sound. The approaching car swerves, running off the road. I sigh, disappointedly. Third time this morning.
Downhill, the town is slowly coming to life, lazily shaking itself awake. Its roofs are dull, coated by decades and decades of dust. I dread going back even though I’m not sure what I’m afraid of. But what are the other options? Where else is left?
The cars driving by are few, and too slow. Not ideal for me. I am looking for a quick collision. To get thrown into the air, and hit the back of a car as it speeds away, its occupants unshaken by my bony body spilling open, or sticking to the tarmac as other cars run it over and over, for days and days, till not even the smell of rot remains. I wouldn’t be the first of my kind to die this way anyway.
Sniff. Nothing. I’m left inhaling dust and coughing it out. I take a deep breath, then I take two more. The silence of the now empty road becomes unbearable, so unbearable that my resolve disappears. I descend the hill into the waking town.
#
I spent all my life here, yet I remember little of it. All that my mind can spit out is a dog, her coat dull with color, barking at me as I ran up the road. Her tongue hung between her canines like a hangman’s empty noose, low and loose. Her voice, rage-filled, burned the wind with her anger. Behind her was another. His dirty coat blended into the soil. His leg split in half. A tooth stuck in the dead half, calling my name.
#
The town has been awake for long enough now. People are everywhere, doing everything they usually do. A sweet scent hides somewhere further down, and I follow it excitedly till I come to an obstacle, and I am stunned. The wall is tall, grey, rough and still damp from the night. Even if I wanted to, I cannot jump over it. My legs are not what they used to be. I breathe in all scents I can find to point me to somewhere I can recognize, but I come up empty again. I stroll around, disturbed by the unfamiliarity till I am thirsty, hungry, and in need of rest.
Ahead of me is a stretch of stalls. The paint, blue and something else, is chipping off, revealing a grainy wall. Exhausted from the long walk, I get on my knees and bury my head in my hands. I close my eyes and inhale: the hot air, the aromas wafting in the air, the sweat, the smell of rejection resurfacing and sitting at the tip of my dry tongue. My stomach rumbles, complaining of its emptiness.
I hear the shuffling of approaching feet. Fear starts to find a place in my bones, but I recall what I am looking for, so I lean into it. It becomes a warmth spreading all over my body. My hunger goes mute, my mind swims in the possibilities that lie ahead.
The makers of the sound come into view. The woman’s steps are both heavy and light, and her gait’s rhythm is hesitant, as if something is missing – one leg is shorter than the other. She carries something. Sniff. Fish. Sniff. Sniff. Fresh fish. Blood stains the basket on her head, dripping on her neck, down to her shoulders. Her hands swing as she walks, talking to a man beside her whose mouth curves, showing his teeth; he seems happy. The woman slaps his hand. He stops and closes his mouth but the happiness migrates to dance on his eyebrows, making them twitch from the excess of it. I get up and whimper behind them.
A school bell rings behind us, and my mind flashes with the image of my first home; its love, its warmth and its people. There was no shortage of love on the streets. I remember that now. The love just never rained where I stood. Some dogs even stole pups from others and nursed them as if they’d birthed them. This dawned on me in stages after the woman and the girl left me out in the street, abandoning me as if I were a curse to be fled. Until then, they were all I had known. Them and the steaks and the bones and running around in the backyard, fetching things for the little girl and her rubbing my belly. The sensation of the girl’s bandaged hand as she petted me one last time comes back reluctantly to mind. I accidentally bit her while play-snatching a piece of chicken from her little hand, but who does not make mistakes? Was that all it took? How can a living thing be discardable, and affection easily forgotten?
There were barely any teeth marks, and yet the punishment was severe. I recall the process of learning the rhythm of survival, and the slow, painful realization days after rain poured so heavily that I was soaked to the bone; weeks after I debased myself, fighting over a trash can because hunger was burning my insides; months after me and another – Bosco, was it? – fought fiercely, scratching and pushing, kicking and biting, over a piece of beef. The meat was rotten, but better rotten in my stomach than in another’s.
#
The man and woman are lost in their world, completely unaware of me. As we get closer to the market, my steps become slower, and the scent of the fish weakens as the woman gets farther away from me. I’m too exhausted to keep up. Her fading footsteps are overshadowed by a stream of the day’s noises: revving engines, roaring laughter, sounds of playing children, donkeys braying, and the jiggling of their water carts.
Sniff, sniff. I pick out a familiar scent, though it is weak underneath several others who come up to me, a group of about five. The air around them is dry, dusty and menacing. I think of running back, but I remember this town owes me, so I stay.
“Well, well, well. If it isn’t the arrogant bastard we all hoped had died,” the one in front barks. I unenthusiastically look at him, begrudgingly letting go of the scent that is calling to me. I see his ear, ripped apart, the teeth marks still visible along the jagged ends. I recall him, Ngui, and his cries of pain as I bit his leg, the pain that shot down my leg as he scratched me. The warmth of his blood on my tongue as I bit his ear. I got the spoils – a fish that fell from the bag of a little boy that we had scared away. Days were stretching, and it seemed nothing died on our streets anymore, and none of us ate grass, so there had to be victims.
His cronies, who I now recall, circle me and echo his filth. As if anyone has ever died from a small scratch to the ear. As if they wouldn’t have done the same.
Ngui keeps talking, prodding me for a response. I only watch him, noting he keeps his distance. “You shouldn’t have come back,” he tries to threaten me. Next to him, Ngiti, smaller and with a higher-pitched bark than necessary, joins in, and I bite down a laugh when I see he still bears several scars from when I clawed him.
Cowards. They still fear me. I smell it on them even as I tune them out, turning my attention to the scent that keeps tugging at me.
Behind the group by the rusted iron sheet fence is a mother feeding her pups, licking their small heads and laughing as their little paws grab the air and try to hide it. I remember her and that laughter of hers. “Kuro?” Her and her kindness, letting me eat what she caught before I learnt to hunt. Her and her patience all those times I crossed into others’ territories, and she had to intervene before I was torn apart. Her and her bile when I chose to leave.
“This town. Me. Bosco. Everyone here. You think you are better? And us, less deserving?” She’d pleaded angrily. Her tongue was dry, her voice wet with tears, the air around us suffocated by the smell of smoke even though nothing was burning.
“No, not that…,” I started but my tongue stuck to my teeth.
Her and her fury as Bosco lay in his blood, one leg shattered. Bosco, the biggest of us all, but always so, so, so clumsy, always running into my canines, especially when it was just me and him. The sound of his bones cracking is still ripe in my mind.
Back then, every part of the town only reminded me of how unwanted I was, except I lacked the language to articulate the rejection. So I kissed Kuro’s dry nose and left. She followed me, I remind myself now. I need that memory; I need it for the love it holds. I knead it, pressing it for any hints of this affection and how she ran after me till I was out of the town, beyond the hill that seals off this town from the rest of the world.
It was her.
“Diya,” she calls my name, steps over her puppies and snarls. Ngui and his misfits retreat.
Another memory scrapes the present raw and old wounds bleed open – Bosco. He stands over Kuro’s pups, some of whom have the same dirty brown coat he has, his left hindfoot incomplete and its stump’s shadow pointing at me.
This. This is what drove me away. What I struggled to articulate to Kuro. Why I left without saying goodbye and why I am back in this town, despite its dust and its spite for me. This. This is why I shouldn’t have come back.
#
Has Kuro forgotten how painful our parting was? I wonder, as she towers over me. Kuro is not shrunken like me. The sun is past the middle of the sky now. The morning’s moisture is long gone, and scents are now engulfed by the town’s sweat.
“Isn’t this a sight?” she says, flashing her canines. I, delighted by her welcome, smile slightly to hide my gap – a missing canine – and I move to kiss her nose. She recoils. Her tail, now only half, is stiff even as a gentle wind picks up. She raises her voice and says, “I told you I’d tear you apart when I catch you.”
Memory shakes the dust off, revealing another layer. The last time I bit Ngui, I was warned. “I’ll make an example out of you,” Kuro had said. And earlier that day, minutes before my escape, Bosco ran into my canines, hurting me and breaking one off. But because he screamed louder, everyone decided he was the victim.
I had been blissfully stalking a bird lost in its song, canines bared to secure it once I pounced. Then, out of nowhere, there was Bosco. Falling into my bite and twisting himself, causing my canines to dig deep into his left leg. Could he not smell me behind him? Weren’t his ears working?
Bosco’s howls grated my ears. He lay on the ground, writhing in pain, calling me names, saying I intentionally hurt him, telling me to shut up, saying there wasn’t any bird to begin with. Then Kuro ran to where we were, where Bosco lay and where I stood, my mouth red with blood, Bosco’s and mine.
I had to run, so I ran.
With fear in my throat, I ran like the wind up the road. My feet barely touched the ground, floating me to an escape.
#
I now recall Kuro barking curses at me, hot on my heels. Her venomous anger blending into the wind, becoming a presence that I couldn’t outrun or live with. Or without.
No, no. I reject it. Kuro loves me…Loved? Had she?
The memory pinches.
She had. I insist.
“You owe me a leg, Diya,” Bosco says while approaching, “…I’ll take this one…” He bites at my left one. I jump, knocking over a trash can and spilling its contents. No one moves to rummage through it. Their eyes are on the reunion, as they form a circle around my old friends and me.
“Traitor! We took you in, fed you and protected you. Then? What did you do?” Kuro bursts angrily. Her nose is almost touching mine.
Bosco limps closer and starts shouting, “Birds in a dry, dusty, and barren place like this? That was a lie. You knew it then, and you know it now. You, cannibalistic, arrogant, stupid excuse of a dog.” His voice gets lower, though it still hurts my ears. “Where has your arrogance taken you?”
Bosco is aggravating and wrong, but he never mattered to me. All he had ever been was a fly on my snout, and he still is one now.
I turn to Kuro who is yelling, “I almost caught you… almost. I was so freaking close. You attacked Bosco. Left him dying. Maimed by your thoughtlessness. Then you ran away like a thief. You are an insult, a disgrace! You hear me? A disgrace! You…”
Bosco chimes in again, cutting Kuro off, “You ungrateful bitch! There were no birds! Just me and you and your little empty head. It was intentional! Admit it. Say it. Say it right now!” His voice is low and angry as if he is hurting just from recalling the past. His tail starts to wag as he circles me, his three footsteps getting closer and closer.
When he pauses, Kuro adds, as if this were a scene in a play they had rehearsed as they waited for me to return, “You have to learn, and you will learn today.”
The worst part of this spectacle is not the heat or the hunger that is slowly starting to burn again, or the thirst planting a desert in my throat. The worst bit is the pack’s expectant gaze.
I realize something as Bosco and Kuro keep blaming me for things I never did, as Ngui’s toothy smile gets wider, and as the pack tightens the circle. This is Kuro telling me she had missed me. Her laughter and growl sounded similar, deep and rich, a sound coming from deep inside her belly.
I had been loved. I had been important to her. This is Kuro and the town loving me back.
Kuro stops and licks her lips, something she always did when she was trying to find her words. I want to make this easier for her, to show her I understand and that she does not need to apologize: I jump at Kuro.
She, swifter than I recall, ducks and pins me down in one stealth move. Her nails dig into me, the sun burns my eyes, and blood fills my mouth. Kuro stares at me, her emotions inscrutable, hiding in the corners of her mouth. Bosco limps over my head, snarls, and then he starts sniffing my legs, all four of them, before picking the one he jabbed earlier. Kuro flinches slightly. Pity floods her eyes, but it doesn’t last.
She doesn’t look away as Bosco tears my leg apart. She doesn’t wince when my blood splutters on her coat. She doesn’t join in when Bosco laughs. She doesn’t blink when he throws the piece he tears away in the air, before catching it in his mouth and spitting it on my face.
The whole pack is waiting for Kuro’s signal; the circle is now tight around the bloody scene. She licks my forehead like she used to, softly, then her canines find my neck. She pulls away before she punctures my skin.
Her jaw tenses.
A pause.
Behind her, the pack is pushing and shoving, all eager to take over from Bosco. When our eyes meet, Ngui smirks and runs his tongue along his canines. I look away, resting my eyes on Kuro, just in time to catch her nod.
There is a slight hesitation, and the silence is the loudest sound I have ever heard. Then it roars. My sight becomes blinded by the cloud of dust that rises as the pack pounces.
My memory is now scrambling to tether itself to old days, searching for remnants of Kuro’s love.
Kuro won’t let them hurt me. She loves me. I reason with myself.
She does.
My coat is thin and easily punctured. I feel every tooth, every paw, and every cut, but somehow the scent sticking to my nose is that of the earth right before it rains. There is another scent clinging to that of the rain.
Sniff. Sniff. Blood. Mine.
Rivulets of red flow from my torn body and join bigger streams that empty into the road. I imagine them binding the dust into red tufts, better than how the rain washes over the town, unable to contain the dust. A little less dust for the town to cough up.
The pain burns till it doesn’t, till the dust inhales me, till it starts to rain where I lie. It pours. The sound of rain falling on my exposed bones is like water rushing down my throat, quenching my thirst. ▪
Cover image: Abandoned, a 2017 painting by Ronex Ahimbisibwe