The Red Hound

So, I was a dog. And he was an incredibly good-looking, possibly rich and completely asinine guy. I hoped that it didn’t mean that she loved him more than she loved me, because our love was constant and unconditional, and I couldn’t bear to see her give all that love and affection up to someone that wouldn’t even return a quarter of it. I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in that it was just an infatuation on her part.

I thought of all the times she snuck me into her room and ran her dainty fingers through my fur and down my body until I fell asleep at the foot of her bed. Her hands were so soft and gentle they were almost ethereal, and her reassurances that I was a good boy dripped from her tongue like sweet honey spun into a lullaby. There was nowhere in the world that I wouldn’t follow her to, there was nothing that I would let hurt her, and there wasn’t one day I’d leave her sad and lonely. I was there when she fought with her dad and lay crying in her bed, kissing away her tears and rubbing my head into her hand, not allowing any heartache to ruin her. I was there when she was in the hospital for breaking her arm falling down the stairs and slept beside her bed despite the scent of death and the sound of a hundred heart monitors beeping away in a hundred rooms. She was my best friend, and I loved her so much my chest ached and I couldn’t stop my tail from wagging furiously every time she walked into the room. I loved her. I was in love with her.

I growled in frustration at the entire situation I had somehow gotten myself into. I had to watch as she fell into a deep infatuation with Martin, even though every day I whispered in her ear: ‘I love you’, and kissed her hands and helped her with her chores. I longed for the human hands I once had, the human mouth, the human legs. I loved and hated this transformation that took hold over me; love, because it led me to me Cara, and hate, because I knew that she would never love me as I loved her. Even if only for one hour I wanted to return to my human form, so I could finally hold her in my arms like I yearned to do for so long and have her love me as deeply as I loved her. But the reasons for this change were unknown to me, and there was nothing I could do to return to being the human Dawson I once was.

Eventually I gave up feeling sorry for myself and left my spot where I had laid moping and headed toward the barn where my old and worn bed was. The barn, the first time I had entered it, nearly knocked me over with the wretchedness of its smell to my heightened dog nose, but after two years I had grown used to it and equated it now to the smell of home—but that didn’t mean that I was still not repulsed by it. I found my dirty bed, circled twice, (just for the humour of it) and dropped myself down with a heavy groan. It had been a long day, and I needed this time to relax and, most importantly, think.

I thought back to where I was when I had first come to be in this body. I had visited the scenario as I lay here thousands of times, but never came to a definite conclusion and only had a mind filled with hypotheses. The transformation had happened one night while I was asleep, and I awoke in my bed curled up under the covers wearing the skin and fur of the form I’m in now. Nothing had happened that had led me to understand the change that had come over me, nothing but the vivid and very real dream I had the night before.

It began when I went for a walk in the forest just down the street from my house at the time. I remember being upset about something, and that’s why I left the comfort of my home in the first place, but the reason I was bothered was trivial and unimportant. In the woods it was so quiet it felt like stepping into another world. Even the autumn breeze which had chilled me to the bone on the walk along the road faded into silence, and the only sound in the entire forest was the crunching of the fallen leaves beneath my feet. There was something very poetic about the forest at that time, and though I was not fond of deep or artistic thinking back then, I couldn’t help but smile at the beauty of the fiery canopy of leaves above my head and the picturesque flat landscape with thin maples rising from the sheets of orange and yellow beneath. My anger had slowly faded away, and I stopped in my place to sigh a balmy sigh and close my eyes at the feeling of tranquillity that had washed over me in that moment. It was then that I suddenly doubled over.

It wasn’t in pain, but rather that I could no longer stand. There was no transition or visible alteration, but a sudden becoming of which I became immediately aware. I knew at once that I was no longer human. I was speculative, not frightened, at least not until a behemoth hound more wolf than dog with blood red fur—and teeth as big and as sharp as daggers—slid from behind a thin tree out of nowhere and introduced himself (for my dream senses told me it was a he) to me as the Red Hound. His walking was as smooth and with as much concealed aggression as a panther, and if it wasn’t for his crimson pelt and grotesque, snarling muzzle I would’ve mistaken him for one. His presence was completely enrapturing despite his flickering, translucent form and choppy existence as if he was a malfunctioning hologram, and he demanded attention as he scintillated about me.

With a voice as deep as his shoulders were broad, he began to speak to me with empty but beautiful words, spoken as if in verse, that had no meaning to me. It was as if he was speaking in some foreign language, but then I realized that he was not the one speaking in a different language, but it was I thinking in one. Upon this realization of mine, he suddenly switched into a heavily accented tongue that I could understand, and explained to me that I was the one who would take his place. He then stretched his neck farther than was physically possible, elongating it as if he was becoming a serpent, and brushed the tip of his nose against my brow, christening me with his own name. In a low but gentle voice, he warned, “Red Hound, life is chasing you at your heels instead of being gripped in your maw, and your spirit and your heart are in your head and not where they rightly should be. Now, though: when the snow falls, your prints will be erased, when the moon rises, your howls will be forgotten, and when you speak no one will listen. Great sorrow is hunting you down, and now you have the tooth and claw to defend yourself against it.”

“If I am the Red Hound,” I asked, “then what are you?”

“I am the rising moon,” was his answer in an echoing voice. A great gust of wind suddenly blew by, catching the former Red Hound’s half-existence in its ghostly fingers and swirling him about in the midst of it as he was carried towards the sky, rising to the twinkling stars etched into the blue-black canvas of the universe. I watched after him, and then the dream faded into black as dreams do. And when I woke up... I was as I am now.

This cryptic and nonsensical dream is the only clue I have to discovering what happened to me, but I can see no sensible way to apply it to reality, so I’ve accepted that whatever happened to me happened to me, and since I don’t know how, I can’t reverse myself back to who I once was. I don’t even care about my abandoned life and my forgotten friends and family or all of my old possessions and physical ties to the world. My only care was my love for Cara; she was all I had.

With a deep and weary sigh, frustrated once again with the futility of deciphering the dream that was so vivid to me, I gently closed my eyes and let myself drift towards the black abyss of sleep. Cara is human, and I am a dog. There is no hope for me, but for a shortened dog’s life of watching her fall in love with someone else, and having her not even notice the yearning and companionship of the human in a dog’s body beside her, looking at her with the intellectual gaze of one of her own kind. My old life is over now, and this is the only world I have left. I should be happy I have as much and make the best of it while it lasts. I only have five years left at most, after all.