3 Animal Scenes

A triptych about animals.

Hound

The hound digs a hole behind the tool shed. He digs until he hits the metal sheet in the ground. He paws at it and whines and his claws scratch against it uselessly, leave pale marks only he will ever see. He sniffs around in the dirt and digs some new holes. All of them go just as deep and then hit the same thing. He growls and he bites at the air. He paces back and forth. He can smell something under the metal and he wants to get at it. It smells rotten in a way that he wants to learn more about with his snout and his mouth. The hound was born inside an overturned dumpster behind a pink building with boards in the windows that used to be a fully nude strip club. Eventually, a man came along and tied him to a stake in the ground and taught him how to be grateful, but his first memories are all of this building, the weeds grown around it, the bottles that would sometimes get broken in the alley, the smell of gasoline from the engines of idling cars. In a sense, it’s all that he’s ever known.