MY NAME IS ZINNIA II - by Zinny

Thank you so much for coming to see me again. I'm ready to continue telling my story, if you are willing to read it.

I've heard some Bipeds say my story is too sad to continue reading. Others say they grow angry whilst reading it. I find both reactions curious. 

If anything, my story is one of love and triumph. Would you read my life's tale had I been fed with a silver spoon? Gotten to work on-time for 50 years? What love grows from comfort or routine? What triumph of the heart can exist without sacrifice? 

Please stay with me and my story.

Give me your heart, your warmth, and your kind murmurings. These are the very things I did not know until Don came into my life. 

And it is the only thing I ask of you going forward.

NO MOTHER HERE

When the truck finally stopped rattling, the Bipeds began their search for me with the impatience of creatures who demand. Their voices rose. The male struck the roof of the truck and the metal answered like a thunderclap.

I did not move.

Stillness, I had learned, can be a kind of invisibility. Beneath the seat, in the stale perfume of grease and old French fries,  I held myself together the way my mother once did— quietly, and with nothing left to give. 

Then the girl Biped found me.

She pulled me out by my back legs like a chicken. Gently at first, then with the certainty of ownership. I was dragged away from my dark keep and I sneezed violently three times. Dust arose, and my front paws scraped uselessly against the carpet, flicking bits of sand and trash, my tiny paws desperately trying to hold on to a world that had already passed. 

She laughed gaily as the male Biped grunted and shut the truck door like he was swatting an enormous fly. Then she pressed me against her massive teats and sneezed herself. 

We made our way toward a looming, massive row of houses. They were duplicates, built without derivation. Why would Bipeds do this? Because they could? I thought about what power they wielded. I believed they were Gods then, and their power well deserved. It did not occur to me that Gods could be accidents; splinters left over from an animal world they discarded long ago.

The male Biped opened a door with a long string of clinky metal keys and I heard a low, reluctant grunt from the thick wooden door. Then we started to climb.

The stairs groaned beneath us, their wooden bones hollowly complaining with each step. I felt as though I was passing through a guarded, hallowed gate, and I buried my face and body into the girl Biped's huge teats. What mammal wouldn't be comforted by that alone? 

The hollow creaking expired at the top of the stairs, and the male Biped opened a door that led into a small apartment. There was one overpowering smell. It was made up of a thousand different scents, but mostly cigarettes, marijuana and beer. There were other curious things I'd never smelled before or since. Like fabric softener and incense. The small windows were dingy, and had probably never been opened, much less cleaned. 

She set me on the carpet, and my paws began to tremble like my long-lost sister's. 

The male Biped retreated to a glowing box filled with battle noises and flickerings. The female stood before me, hands on her hips, with a smile that did not reach her eyes, as though I were something she had wanted for a long time, and now did not know what to do.

And then my body betrayed me. I relieved myself on the carpet. It was the worst of all possible things I could do. I couldn't help it.

She cried out and stepped back. The male moved in. He rose quickly, seized me, and pressed my nose into the sharp liquid scent of my mistake. His anger was impersonal, like a snow squall or a large wave. I struggled, my heart hammering against my ribs as I fought to bring my nose up from the carpet and inhale air, and not my own urine.

After what seemed a deep time, he released me and I ran in frantic circles, yelping, searching for clean air, earth, or sky. I swept the room with my eyes looking for any opening through which I might possibly escape. But the apartment was sealed and well above the ground; a cage lifted into the air. There was no escape. 

He let me run around for a bit. When he tired of me, he grabbed me by my neck and staidly tossed me into my waiting crate, and locked it. The crate pad smelt of another, long-gone dog, and of puppies. 

Yet there was no mother here.

I spent the entire night locked in my new prison. My still-full bladder kept me up- able to betray me in an instant. Ironically, there was a bowl of water, but no food. I hadn't been fed since the night before.

This was the first time I felt my mother's despair boldly ascending within me. There was no going back.

My mother's sorrow was not something to fear. Indeed, it was a gift - a makeshift shield. Thin, rickety, but all mine. 

Save for this shield, I was alone.

Endure, it said to me over and over.

MORNING COMES LIKE A WEAK APOLOGY

Joan— that was her name— opened my crate with something like gentleness, as if she knew there was damage but refused to look at it directly. She fastened a collar around my neck festooned with smiling cartoon dogs, and clipped a leash with the same cartoon dogs on it.

We made our way down those living-wood steps, and out the heavy door to the outside.

I started peeing instantly, and a neighbor yelled at us from his window. Joan got angry. She unleashed a string of frightful curses and hand gestures at the neighbor and flicked her lit cigarette butt at his car.

There was a tiny lawn that smelled just awful- ripe with dog and Biped pee. Trash was everywhere, blowing in the wind.

My poops were encouraged to happen in the roadside ditch where the landlord had no authority and Joan felt no need to clean up after me. I soon realized it was the source of the rotting smell. 

I marveled at Joan inasmuch as she always let me out at least twice a day no matter the circumstance. I remember pooping in biting cold, with heavy thunderdrops hammering my tiny head, blizzards where my nose was sandblasted, and the time when poor Joan was so convulsively hungover she had to rest her upper body face-down on the hood of the truck. Her cigarette rolled out of her finger. She snored and let go of my leash. 

Was I free? I couldn't tell, so I waited dutifully at her feet. 

Joan rallied after a long while. I noticed neighbors looking at us from their windows. Though it was a remarkable Maine summer day, we marched straight up the stairs and Joan threw food and water in my bowls. Then she retreated to her darkened room. When it began to get dark, she exploded out of her room and ran me outside to pee again. She threw food and water in my bowls again and went straight back to bed, neglecting to lock me in my crate.

I finished my dinner and widened the crack in the door with my anvil-like head and went into her bedroom. Her and the male Biped were asleep on the futon. I stared at her. I had never seen a Biped asleep before. She was breathing heavily and gutturally, but she looked peaceful. Almost lovely with her black hair cascading over her face. 

I hopped up on the futon and went to curl up on her belly. The male Biped instantly  jumped up and Joan let out a "No no no no no!!!!" The male Biped brought me back to my crate by the scruff of my neck and locked it.

I never made it up on the Biped bed again. And I always made sure I was in my crate before the male Biped came home. 

Always.

His name was Doug.

CRUELTY, LIKE HUNGER

Everything changed when Joan was gone.

Doug filled the apartment with other male Bipeds like himself— unsteady, loud, colliding with one another in bursts of laughter and challenge. Their laughter had rules. Defy those rules and be cut without warning.

Another puppy named Roger came to one of these parties. It was so odd that her name was Roger. Perhaps that's why I remember her to this day. She was small, fast, alive. We ran through the chaos, weaving between legs, jumping up on couches, collecting fallen scraps. For a moment, I remembered what it was like to have a friend and fun.

Then it quickly shifted.

They were drunk. Slurring voices rose. Their movements became unpredictable like sharks with blood in the water.

They started throwing things at each other. Then they started throwing things at us. It seems cruelty, like hunger, is never satiated. 

A small comet whizzed by my head and skittered away on the rug. The second piece caught me in the rear leg and I yelped out in pain. There was resounding Biped laughter.

I did not understand the game. And neither did Roger. She stood looking at the crowd dumbfoundedly as they continued throwing ice cubes. One caught her in the chest and she shrilled in alarm. A cheer went up. Mere seconds later, another struck my head. My world tilted. Another struck my back. A cheer rose up— sharp and triumphant, like they had accomplished something magnificent.

I crawled into a corner and made myself small. Smaller. As small as I had ever been. I tried to wink myself out of existence, but they kept throwing.

When they began to throw the ice at themselves again, I got up and ran for the crate. Roger was already in there, terrified and as far back as she could get. I curled up next to her and her breathing relaxed. We spent the night like that - sharing our warmth in a crate that was both a prison and a safe.

 A hand reached deep into the crate the next morning and Roger was carried away.

I never saw her again. 

A NIGHT OF BORROWED KINDNESS

Another night there was a huge male Biped with long, thick, straggly hair dressed in a heavy leather jacket with gigantic zippers. He smelled of exhaust and whiskey. He grabbed me up in his enormous hands and carried me around all night in the crook of his arm. He fed me little bits from his food. He expertly rubbed my ears and head. I fell in love with  him. He was the closest thing to joy I had in a long time.

He laughed loudly and from a place deep down within him. It roiled out of him like he didn't even have control over it. He had an aura about him where you knew nothing bad would happen to you, so long as you were with him.

I remember Doug slurring, "When I wake up, Zinny had better be in her crate!" He said it several more times before he fell asleep sitting on the couch in his underpants with a half-spilled beer and the TV blaring. 

In the early morning, The Leather-Clad Biped tried to put me in my crate. I fought like hell. Not only because I wanted to go with him, but because I hadn't been let out to relieve myself since yesterday morning. Doug wouldn't be awake for a very long time. I hoped the Leather-Clad Biped would at least get my secondary message and let me outside to pee, but he was groggy and left me in my crate with a swollen bladder that was certain to lightningrod Doug's anger later that afternoon. 

THE OPEN DOOR

One night during another one of Doug's parties, the doors to the stairs were left open.

I stared at it for a very long time.

I went down those worn stairs. They did not creak or talk to me like they did the Bipeds. They were hushed and watching. Through the threshold, and out into the biting cold air I went.

My breath left my body in pale clouds, drifting and evaporating away from me. What kind of magic was this? I watched, afraid I was dissolving in the cold. No matter how slowly I breathed, the exhale gave more of my soul away to the Great Black Dog of Death. 

Above me, the sky stretched open— vast, silent, unconcerned.  I hid beneath the truck. It offered some protection against the vastness of this world. 

Was I free? 

I understood then that Freedom was not the absence of walls. It was knowing what to do without those walls.

And so I lay there beneath that run-down truck, the cold creeping into my very bones, the night stretching wider than anything I had ever known.

I did not yet understand what freedom meant, only that it felt as frightening as it did possible. My mother’s sad voice— her strength— stirred within me once more. 

Endure, it said. Not because your world is kind, but because you are young and there is something beyond this world worth finding. I did not know what she meant, or what was waiting for me. But I stayed under that truck as the stars burned away with their frigid heat, distant and unmoved.

Doug would come for me soon.

And he would not be pleased.

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These memories extract something of me each time I return to them. Some settle gently. Others rattle my old bones and do not let go. Either way, they leave me tired when I tell them true.

Let me rest here for a little while.

When you come back, I will tell you of the time I took something that was not mine and paid for it for the rest of my life, and the next time I saw The Black Dog.

— Zinnia