Dead Dogs by Joe Murphy Page A

This always reminds me of the snotty asthmatic kid in school who gets his jumper pulled over his head. Then you cut its head off. After this you empty out its belly and the cavity under its ribs and then you wash off all the blood and all the slime and all the fluids.
    The trouble is sometimes when you’re doing this you catch the sac of the intestines with the point of your skinning knife. The trouble is your knife is really fucking sharp so when it snags this brown-purple sausage of gut it punches straight through it like a surgeon’s scalpel. This is pretty easy to do, especially the first few times you do it. It’s the smell that gets you.The smell of punctured viscera. The smell of half-formed shit and half-digested food. The smell of violation and death and indignity.
    This is the smell that fills the kitchen.
    And suddenly I’m thinking, please don’t let it be a person. Please don’t let it be a person.
    And from beside me Seán goes, ‘I’m really sorry. Really really sorry.’
    I’m nearly puking now but I’m saying, ‘What the fuck have you done, Seán?’
    Seán slides past me and into the kitchen the way on telly a big ship will slide through an oil spill. He is all weight and silence and he points into the far corner of the kitchen. He points into the far corner of the kitchen but his eyes stay fixed on the concrete floor.
    Not wanting to, I follow him and stare at where he’s pointing.
    In the far corner of the concrete box there’s what looks like a rug, all bundled up and lying in a puddle of shadow. Around this lump there are five or six other small lumps. All are lying in darkness and all are unmoving.
    With my hand to my mouth I’m taking a step towards the lumps. I can’t make them out in the gloom and so I’m taking another step and then another.
    And then I see what they are.
    There’s a dead dog lying in the corner of the kitchen, lying in a slick of her own blood, lying with her dead puppies all around her. Her stomach is slit all the way open. Dead dogs litter the cold concrete floor.
    When I get sick it rushes out of my mouth and just keeps on coming.
    I don’t know how I get outside. I don’t how I turn on my heel with vomit on my chin, vomit on my lips, vomit in my throat. I don’t know how I stumble along the hallway. I don’t know how quickly I manage to get away from that room with its stench and its horror. All I know is that now I’m standing in the half-finished porch sucking great gulps of air through my nose and mouth and I don’t know how I got here. I can smell the mud and the rain and the wet concrete. I can smell the smells of decay and abandonment . I can smell the acid stink of my own puke.
    Then Seán’s beside me and out of fear and anger and disgust I go, ‘Don’t fucking touch me! Jesus Christ what the fuck is wrong with you?’
    Seán just stares at me, sadly. He knows that this is coming. He knows what people are going to say if this gets out. He knows he has done a really bad thing.
    I know that he knows this and he just stares vacantly at me. The stones of his eyes are wide and round and wet in the dark.
    I’m looking at him and now I’m scrubbing at my mouth with the sleeve of my jacket. I should have a bottle of water in my gear bag and I start to root around to try and find it. I have to get the smell out of my throat. I have to wash the vomit off my face. I find the bottle and the water is cold and it ripples shivers all over my body but the goosebumps aren’t there from the water.
    Seán watches me in silence and I stare back at him and go,‘What the fuck are we supposed to do now? Why would you do something like that?
    Seán’s sighing and he brings both of his big hands up to his face and then he drags them down along his cheeks. They pull his face out of shape for a moment like he’s about to pull off a latex mask and not be Seán anymore.
    He’s sighing and he goes, ‘I didn’t kill her. I saw her being hit by a car. The driver