Bad Dog Suicide (assisted)
Some parks are dog parks, and some are people parks. Sammy could neither tell, nor for that matter did he care, which was which, so long as he could run. His proud jaw lolling open, tongue flooding with thick saliva formed so fast it fizzed.
And if you threw something? Sammy would be there before it hit the ground. He was a hunter, a law unto himself, the sheriff of dog town, a genuine ‘bad’ dog as his owner cursed when barking over an important phone call or whipping the ice cream out of her bowl.
Today, Sammy chased a bubble through the park. Sun light flashed off it’s mathematically perfect surface as Sammy bounded elegantly in tow, darting between trees, gracefully leaping family picnics and sleeping girls.
Each stride brought Sammy closer to his prey and each fresh breeze tore the bubble away in a brand new direction.
For a second Sammy lost sight of the bubble as it drifted over a hedge but Sammy was unstoppable, leaping high over the top… into total darkness.
In the darkness Sammy felt a deep ache, a damp bruise opening in his side.
He struggled one eye open giving a letterbox slit of light just enough room to slip in revealing green grass blurring in the bright sunlight, his own back legs, arched underneath him, and the thick set iron fence which had skewered his broken body.
Sammy was unable to twist his heavy head around far enough to see the damage but he could feel an unknown shape throbbing through his midriff displacing his lungs and heart.
Then pain. Immeasurable pain flooded Sammy’s limbs and forced him to yelp. His body breaking down, eyes wet, puss leaking down his proud jaw dripping to where a bubble lay on the green grass.
For a second the bubble seemed to wait, white light splitting into multiple colours and blinking in Sammy’s direction, briefly blinding him before it popped under the weight of a small red shoe.
Sammy moved his eyes slowly up the body of an eight year old boy.
The boy wore blue dungarees with one strap open, hanging lightly by his side and a white ‘denim crew’ t-shirt. He had an awkward, square face, small hands and oversized ears.
Geese flapped their wings in the distance, a merry go round melody dissolved into the hum of distant traffic and the general hubbub of people saturated an otherwise perfect silence.
The boy laughed, an accident.
He moved closer and could see all that Sammy could not.
The fence was old and had been a deep mint green in its more memorable days. Now it simply flaked and lay mostly ignored beneath a lush green hedge, partly pruned.
The top of the fence was lined with decorative spikes, not especially sharp, and yet it was one of those flaky, green, iron spikes that had pushed a hole from one side of Sammy’s body to the other.
Thick blood oozed softly down the fence, clogging in the cracked paint and forming a rapidly congealing pool in the grass.
The boy had calmed, he gazed into Sammy’s dripping eyes and pulled a small handkerchief from his pocket gently wiping some of the puss away.
Sammy blinked through the pain, the puss had stained his vision and the world had slid into a kaleidoscopic blur. Piece by piece he put the world back together.
He saw shapes of green, some darker than others, trees, bushes and grass. Flashes of blue diamonds sparkled in between.
Then, somewhere beyond, he could make out a new shape, growing rapidly as a long red lead flashed past Sammy’s eyes.
For the boys’ mother the images formed much more quickly. Emerging from the trees she could see a heavy shape, a dog, draped, no, skewered on a small flaky green iron fence and her son slowly wrapping the dogs red lead around it’s neck.
Sammy couldn’t hear the boys’ mother screaming, he could barely even see her as blood flooded his eyeballs and his battered lungs begged for air.
The throbbing in his chest deepened but the pain drifted softly away and as Sammy’s blood stained eyes wrapped shut the boy turned to face his screaming mother.
Tossing him out of the way she tugged the lead off and over the dogs head.
But it was too late.
Her Sammy was dead.
