The Dog Uncle

The dog rouses itself. Licks itself like its whole body is massaging its tongue. Things begin with a scrap of diary…
My uncle is suddenly closer. I can smell him… These then are the dog days, gulping at her mind…
Today I could smell somebody smoking in the car ahead, even though all the windows were closed… The days of the old black dog, the dog-eared dog whose hunger will hunt her with the persistent grace of a life-sentence bounty hunter: implacable, imperturbable, always either there or imminent…
Yesterday, I could smell a friend’s perfume on the bridge over the canal half an hour after she had crossed… The dog is on its hind legs, impossibly elongated against the sun, the sinew-stretch of its muscles thrusting its glare and slaver towards the sky…
His smell is as strong as that… The dog drops to its all fours and breaks into a run and comes loping over the tarmac prairie, stones lodging and dislodging as it paws its broken-clawed way to home…
Why do I smell him like that? The smell slipping in fast but sliding out slow, taking half a life to do so. Half a life remaining given over to a particular submission to someone else’s smell, to the inevitability of pursuit and the inevitability of capture and the fear of infiltration…
And what is it, anyway, this smell of my uncle? I mean, it’s just like any other smell: a compound of substances…Just a compound of substances…A compound of substances… The dog about to appear is the slow-stopping dog of the rest of your life, arriving from childhood, about to stop at youth, then calling at maturity, old age and senility and terminating at slow, lingering, ignominious death…
I can’t go out yet. Things seem too intense… The air is set foul, the day turned to one of those days when it has all scowled over, when the place seems to be full of beggars, holding out non-existent hands, presiding over their shallow pools of coins…
It’s like I’ve left some trail and he can scent me… The ragged dog, mud smeared up its paws, burrs in its pelt, panting in the heat of its resolve, waiting its time to fang the soft tissue of the brain, slurp the cooked-soft warm fat of a skinny little life…
I keep dreaming… Waking screaming, drenched in a sweat that smells of dog saliva, a handless arm dangling in front of her eyes in the second before waking…
Every night something happens… Waking screaming, dreaming of a dog-wet awakening from a limbless dream…
It’s never him but it always seems like him… Waking screaming, dreaming of a dream of a dream of mutilation and capture, flung into chambers of humiliation...
I don’t think I’m going crazy, but who knows? Waking up silent from a set of interlocking dream-puzzles, waking up silent but dry and going to the mirror and finding a circle of punctures around the neck, like a necklace of canine teeth extracting revenge in the night. And screaming…
Everyone else in the house thinks there’s something wrong with me… Screaming into the mirror and screaming back at herself, screaming rebounding, rebounding screaming, each its own reflection…
I think they’re worried about me… Screaming into the mirror and screaming back at herself, bits of flayed-off silver dropping with the shrill vibration of it…
If things don’t get better, I might have to go home for a while. I just can’t concentrate at the moment… Screaming out of the mirror and staying silent in reply, bits of flaked-out skin dropping with the shrill vibration of it…
Don’t know if that will be any better, though… Options being discarded. Circles around her being reduced and reined in closer…
Every time I think of home now, I seem to get stupidly nostalgic: home now is all wood-fires, country walks and the feel of dog hairs underneath my hand. I know it’s not real, but it was once. The cloying mothball smell of experience now outdated but not yet stretched away from…
But somehow, the smell of my uncle and the smell of the dog have merged. The smell of my uncle has taken over the smell of the dog… The dog-smell of the uncle like a thickened skin around her. Permanent. Leaking. Foreign…
It will never let me go, but there’s no way out… There is no way back, either: no way back to memories of the family pet dog untainted by the smell of the uncle…
I have a feeling that things are about to come to a head. All of this must end soon… It ends with the knock of an uncle’s knuckles on the brown splintered paint of the big front door…