Barking John, or You Are What You Eat (teaser)

©2011 Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

If all you could do was bark, it wasn’t the family to be born into. They mightn’t have cared more, or coddled me less, had I been greater or lesser a specimen. They hadn’t the patience for difference, but they weren’t spiteful people; as it was they drank until drunk and largely ignored me.

“Where is he?” I heard one or the other of them through the window late in the afternoon, the vodka dull and flat in their bodies and their brains, and then the crash of a limb on a table, a starfished hand, slapping wetly the thigh of another —my mother and my father.

“Out with the dogs, I should say,” came the reply.

My mother: “Those who run with the dogs—” and here she stopped and searched for the climax to the adage.

“That’s not how it goes,” said my father, and I think I heard him spew. There was coughing to be sure.

“It’s with the wolves.”

“Yes,” he managed, once his lungs settled. “It’s wolves.”

“How does it end?”

And my father said, “Karla, hush.” It was silent for a long time, so long the dogs shifted around and about me in the kennel, until I was almost entirely covered and thankful for it, for it was cold here. And then as I dropped to sleep I heard him say, “It won’t end, I suppose.” He was always sentimental.

I do not know why I bark. I made to form words and barks came instead. Later in my life a psychologist speculated that it was the formative years spent among the dogs my parents kept outside the house, but I know I barked before then. I barked because I barked.

(The story in its entirety will be appearing in a print anthology of contemporary fables from Pelgrane Press, tentatively titled Aesop 3.0., in 2012 or 2013. Thank you for your comments given in the process of writing this. I do appreciate them. KK)