Today’s May 25th. Nothing special about it other than one year ago exactly, a kid knocked on my door. I opened up with a beer in my hand. In those days, there was always a beer in my hand. I’d finish one and squeeze the can and throw it down and, right away, go to the fridge for another. This kid had a look. Frazzled, harried. His hair went all over and there was dirt on his face. Blue jeans ripped at both knees, the whole bit.

“You here to sell me a Bible or a vacuum or what?”

How long had the sun been up? Didn’t Kimmel just come on?

“Mister, have you seen my dog?”

“Nope. No dogs around here. What kind is he?”

“A mutt.”

I turned and looked back through my house, then back at the kid.

“What do you call him?”

“Charger.”

“Charger.”

“Because he’s always running into things.”

“And what is he, black, white, spotted?”

Everything outside was on fire from the sun. But the kid’s cheek-dirt was streaked under his eyes, I could see that, and I knew he’d been crying.

“Brown,” the kid said, “but his belly is white. And he has two different eyes.”

“We all have two different eyes. Unless we’re cyclopses. Is your dog a cyclops? Are you a cyclops?” I was trying to kid with him.

“One’s blue.”

“A brown mutt with a white belly and one blue eye. I’ll keep an eye out. Both my eyes out. That’s the best I can do. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been out of the house much lately. You live around here?”

Without turning, the kid pointed up and to his right and, judging from the way he pointed, he was telling me that he lived on the roof of my kitty-corner-across-the-street-neighbor’s house.

“Somewhere over there, huh?”

“Yep.” The kid’s voice came out half an inch north of a whisper. After a second of just standing there, he turned and jumped down the porch steps and went running around to Lynn’s place next door.

I pushed the door closed and plopped back into my La-Z-Boy, where I’d been roosting for the past however long. It’d be a good, long wait for Kimmel, since the sun was out now, so I thought about the kid and his dog and what the dog might really look like with that white belly and blue eye. What tricks the kid might’ve taught the dog—shake hands, speak, fetch, roll over—and why the dog ran off in the first place.

After awhile, I got up and went to the bedroom and shucked the pillowcase off Trina’s pillow, still with the dent from her head the last time she slept here. I went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, filled the pillowcase with all the cans of beer I had left, and slung it over my shoulder like goddamn Santa. Then, back to my chair.

Pretty soon, or maybe it was forever later, it was dark again and Kimmel came on. Right in the middle of some bit about the Hollywood sign, there was a thump on my door. A thump and a scratch.

I was a slow drunk, the kind who slid away from the world at a sludgy pace. I had buddies who could party all night with gin in them like it was nitro fuel. But the more I drank, the slower I got and the slower the world got and I wonder, now, if I wasn’t trying to synch the world to me at a dead standstill.

I finally made it to the door and clanked around with the knob and the deadbolt. When I got it open, the first thing I saw were the moths. About a million, in these bombing arcs around the bare bulb.

“Jesus, shut up,” I slurred, meaning not really shut up. Just be still.

Then a snarl grabbed my gaze from the moths. Just outside the raggedy circle of light was a dog, in the half-shadows, where light and dark were about the same. I could see one eye was different from the other.

“Dog,” I said, “I know you. Charger.”

It snarled again, whimpered, then limped all the way into the light, tipped over, and lay there panting. From its neck just behind the flopped over ear and down the side, the brown fur had darkened and matted and the white on the belly had turned livid red, and rust colored at the fringes. The dog wanted to snarl again, and he peeled back his top lip to show me his teeth. But no sound came out. He was breathing with his entire body, huge gulps of air. A sudden shudder ran through him, snout to tail, like he’d touched a live wire. Then he was still.

“No. No, no, no, no, no.”

I got down beside him, bopped him on the snout. “Hey, wake up,” and of course he wouldn’t. I flicked his ears, one, then the other, then the first one again.

“Charger, why? What are you doing here? I’m not your boy. I’m not your person.”

I tipped back a few after that. And I sure made a mess of things. In the morning, I woke up stuffed into my chair. The whole house reeked. I found Charger glued to my kitchen table in a sticky pool of blood. His tongue had flipped out and turned gray and hung off one of his fangs and that blue eye had fogged over good. I saw that I’d piled towels beside the dog, the ones from the hall closet, the ones with our initials sewn into them. I guess I grabbed what I could. What was there. Still there. A couple of spools of dental floss, too. A pair of scissors and I guess, before blacking out, my plan was to stitch him up. I could see ribs through the gash even now.

For a long time, I stared at the very pathetic thing on my table. Then I put shoes on and hobbled outside. Down the porch, down the walk, into the street. I moved like my legs were new, like you could purchase new legs from a body parts dealer, like I was out for a test drive. “Give that pair a whirl. Go around the block, see how you feel. We’ll talk terms when you get back.” Larry’s Legs, EZ Credit. The last time I ventured outside, it had been a whole other season. I remember big, red-colored leaves and now they were all green, and yellow-green, and very small. It was sunny out again, very sunny, and I cast a shadow that made me feel squeamish.

Like it or not, pal, here you are. There is the proof. You move. You take up space. So, then what? Ring all the doorbells? Ask for the kid at every house? Stand in the street and just start shouting?

---

Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021), The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024), Cult Life (Tenpenny Books, 2024), and Mercy (Walnut Street Publishing, 2025.)  He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, USA. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.

---