Dead Dogs by Joe Murphy

receding into the distance and all her movements are jerky and spastic. The terror that I feel isn’t an emotional thing. It is in my muscles and bones. It is something physical that crushes me and buries me and scalds my throat.
    This is the last proper memory that I have of my mother. Being terrified as she seems to vanish into the dark. Dread on dread.
    This is the last time I’m really afraid. Actually really afraid.
     
    Now I’m standing looking into this open sore of a half-finished house and I can feel that same fear bucking in my chest. I can feel the vomit churn in my gut. I’m looking from the empty doorframe to Seán and then back again. I can still get that weird smell. Something organic and rotten. Something that wants to sour the mucus in your throat and seed infection in your sinuses.
    My tongue comes out and rasps along lips that feel like strips of leather stitched onto my face. I’m licking my lips and I’m going, ‘What’s in there, Seán?’
    Seán shakes his big head and he goes, ‘I don’t want anyone else to see this. I don’t know what to do.’
    I look at him for a minute and he looks at me and then the two of us are walking through the empty doorframe.
    Inside, the house is a cold empty cube made up of smaller cold empty cubes. None of the walls are plastered and there’s ragged holes in them for wiring and fittings that will never be wired orfitted. The place is haunted by the ghost of what might have been. It is a non-existent home for a computer-generated family. The cold is so sharp in here that it straightaway sinks into your skin and penetrates your muscles. I’m still cold and still wet from training and this place is acting like a fridge so that I’m shivering only a few steps into the hallway. My breathing is coming harder and with every breath I pull more of the damp and more of the cold and more of that awful smell into my lungs.
    Seán leads the way down the hall and his footsteps grind on the clammy concrete dust that powders the place. It’s like wet talcum to the touch. I’m following him and I’m getting more and more uneasy with every step. The smell is getting stronger and in front of us there’s the rectangular hole of what should have been a kitchen door. Seán’s frame is a moving wedge of darkness and with his shoulders stooped and his head hanging he looks like something out of a horror story.
    Seán stops at the threshold between the hall and the kitchen and he goes, ‘It’s in here. I’m really sorry. Really, really sorry.’
    The kitchen at least has windows and a sliding patio door in one wall that looks out over a three-foot drop into a ditch of filthy water. Pipes prod up out of the concrete floor, prongs of plastic tubing onto which washing machines and dishwashers, sinks and tumble dryers should be slotted. Not now though. Now the fuzzy light from the town and the road filters in through the windows and makes it look like my club’s dressing rooms. Migraine-grey and swamped in shadow.
    Only the smell is vibrant.
    A good few times, when I’m off over at my uncle’s, himself and my Da are skinning rabbits. What you do is you slit the skin of the belly and kind of fold it over the knee joints of the back legs. The skin separates from the muscle underneath a lot easier than you’d think. It makes a sound like peeling velcro. Then you make a nick in the back legs. Then you break them and cut off the lucky rabbit’s feet. You do this with pheasants too and you can grab the little white slippery tab of the severed tendon and pull on it. This makes the claws curl in on themselves like the dead pheasant is shaking its fist at you. When you have the skin pulled off the stubs of the back legs you can then tug it up along the back until you get to the head. All the time you’re doing this you’re hearing the same tearing noise of peeling velcro. Once you get the skin up to the head you can let it dangle all limp and pathetic over the rabbit’s face.