Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: The Family Pet (05/15/08)
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TITLE: A Love Transformed | Previous Challenge Entry
By David Johnston
05/22/08 -
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September 12th 2009, although dates no longer matter.
Time is measured neither by the calendar, decaying somewhere under the rubble, nor the clock, a redundant tick with broken hands. My life has become eternal, no longer a series of moments: each dead body is the same as the first, each meal merely a prelude to the inevitable hunger, each night just a different colour from the day. Today I was hungry. Alone in my former bedroom, the echoes of distant gunfire were the only sign of distancing life. I held onto my dog until the tears became as dry as my throat.
September sometime.
The dog had been born into our family, long before the anonymous enemy released a wave of destruction on our town, long before the snipers took over the hilltops and my brother had forlornly run into the street to come to a surprised halt against the front door. Our dog used to sit on that porch, barking as we laughed, sharing in our sufferings when life became too much. As the sun began to set and the wine began to take hold we would joke that he was fully human, fully canine, asking for nourishment with bones of words and barks of peace. Let me try to piece together his final moments. I haven’t eaten since the day before the one I called the 12th. His flesh has begun the process of decomposition. After a few days, you’re no longer hungry. After a few days, tiredness sets in. And death will follow.
Cold and wet.
The war affected us all at first: the shelling, the surprise as the sound of old-fashioned reality came crashing into our modern lives. A wall would be destroyed, a roof would collapse and we would become trapped. Another fire as the last days began; the sound of the earth quaking as mortars fell around us, as we retreated to our houses, muttered prayers, expected a salvation which seemed to be buried by each explosion. Sirens lured some to the streets to collapse, a bullet through the brain, the heart, the heady proximity of death contaminating our movements, our thoughts, our hopes. Enclosed by the unsteady walls of our house, no way to emerge from our own rotting valley, we nourished ourselves on what was left in what was no longer a home. Day by day, the food dwindled and disease began to take my family, beginning with my aunt who infected her husband, continuing in death as she had in life. Food ran out and my father sat with my mother and our dog.
Today.
We killed him. It’s early in the morning and today I can feel death’s glare. We killed him. I haven’t eaten and salvation lies only in this rotting flesh before me but I refuse to eat him. We killed him. I remember us pronouncing his death sentence with one voice, rejecting him whom we loved. His own family killed him and I can’t even remember him making a noise.
My last day.
Perhaps the world has rejected me as we rejected him, killing him for his flesh, greedily feasting on him without recognising who he was. I’m hungry. The sounds of warfare are only a backdrop to my inner hunger, to my need of nourishment. I look at him, his expression still one of love. I look at him, our faithful dog. I look on him, slowly sink my teeth into his flesh and I feel transformed.
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