Howl by Bark Editors

the same woman I’d spoken to on the phone, who picked up the phone and called Kenny, the shelter-hand. He was apparently in the double-wide, where the dogs were kept, as opposed to the cinder-block, where the vets were.
    “Kinny. That woman is here to pick up the Poodle–Shit Soo mix.”
    I shook my head dramatically; no no no, I am not that woman. Anyone looking at me would know I’m not even remotely that woman. “I’m here for Dewey,” I said, pointing to his little picture, which I’d carried with me like a War Orphan looking for her parents.
    “Aw wait. She’s here for Dewey.” She paused. “Okay, I’ll tell her.” She hung up the phone and I knew in my bones that he’d been gassed and was on a big corpse pile behind the cinderblock. “Kinny’s a’skeert of that dawg and don’t want to get him out of his cage. He says ever time he gits near him, that dawg tries to bite him. Kinny’s a’skeert.”
    “So I hear. Do you want me to go get him?”
    “I’ll go get him,” one of the younger Carhartts whispered. Her voice was so quiet I feared she’d been the victim of a rogue tracheotomy. Her hair was long and wavy, her breasts were large, and her cheeks were flushed with high color. She was a child formed by a rapid influx of estrogen, and I didn’t dare look at her too closely or too long, for fear I’d make her pregnant. She moved slowly through the clinic, slowly down the steps, and across the drive to the double-wide. A few minutes later she came in carrying Dewey.
    I’ve seen some dogs in my life. I grew up in a town where dogs weren’t restrained, and in fact could run for public office. I saw a rabid dog shot in the street, just like in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
(To be honest, the town marshal shot his own hat off and the dog fell down, scared to death.) I’ve seen dogs limping around barnlots with only a couple of usable limbs, and dogs dying of disease, and dogs hit by cars. But I’ve never seen anything quite like Dewey. His bat ears were lying flat against his head; his whole body was tensed; and he was screaming as if caught in a trap. He was bleeding from both eyes, and the blood had covered the white patch on his chest. The parts of him not sticky with blood were slick with urine and diarrhea. The girl who’d gotten him out of his cage carried him into an examination room and put him on a table, where he stood trembling so hard I thought he might be seizing. She stood close to the table and let him lean up against her.
    And then into the room lumbered Kenny, who was roughly the size of a mature walnut tree, bearded, and built like a military vehicle.
    “That dawg bit me good,” he said, in a voice that caused the floor to shake. “But he’s not bad in his heart.”
    I turned and looked at him and my eyes filled with tears. I wasn’t sure what I was crying about, but the whole situation was so wretched I suddenly couldn’t help myself.
    “How’d he get this way?” I asked, still not daring to approach the screaming dog.
    “His owner got mad at him and that Poodle, kicked them in their heads. This one’s been bleeding from his eyes all night.”
    Anyone who has worked with stray dogs knows that you have to read a myriad of signs before adopting or fostering, and not just the obvious things like how well they do with other dogs and children. What you look for first of all, and most importantly, is
sanity,
simple as that. What I was seeing was the most traumatized dog I’d ever met. Dogs go crazy from lots of things. Pit Bull Terriers, a breed that loves people more, maybe, than any other, can be broken from exile in a backyard, just from the lack of human contact. Abandonment will break the heart of most things, really. This dog had been brought to a ghastly place, separated from the companion dog with whom he’d lived his whole life, been forced to listen to the frantic and desperate barking of all the other dogs who were about to be euthanized. And just as a bonus, his