by Kij Johnson
(A slave is trapped, choiceless and voiceless, but so is her owner. Those we have injured may forgive us, but how can we know? Can we trust them with our homes, our lives, our hearts? Animals did not forgive before the Change. Mostly they forgot. But the Change brought memory, and memory requires forgiveness, and how can we trust them to forgive us?
(And how do we forgive ourselves? Mostly we don’t. Mostly we pretend to forget.)
At noon the next day Linna jerks awake, monkey-self already dragging her to her feet. Even before she’s fully awake, she knows that what woke her wasn’t a car’s backfire. It was a rifle shot and it was only a couple of blocks away and she already knows why.
She drags on clothes and runs to Cruz Park, no stitch in her side this time. The flashing police cars and caution tape and men are all still there but now she sees dogs everywhere, twenty or more laid flat near the sidewalk, the way dogs sleep on hot summer days. Too many of the ribcages are still; too many of the eyes open, dust and pollen already gathering.
Linna has no words, can only watch speechless; but the men say enough. First thing in the morning the Animal Control people went to Dillon’s grocery store and bought fifty one-pound packages of cheap hamburger on sale, and they poisoned them all and then scattered them around the park. Linna can see little blue styrene squares from the packaging scattered among the dogs.
The dying dogs don’t say much. Most have fallen back into the ancient language of pain, wordless keening. Men walk among them shooting the suffering dogs, jabbing poles into the underbrush looking for any who might have slipped away.
People come in cars and trucks and on bicycles and scooters and on their feet. The police officers around Cruz Park keep sending them away—”A health risk,” says one officer: “Safety,” says another—but the people keep coming back, or new people.
Linna’s eyes are blind with tears. She blinks and they slide down her face, oddly cool and thick.
“Killing them is the answer?” says a woman beside her. Her face is wet as well but her voice is even, as though they are debating this in a class, she and Linna. The woman holds her baby in her arms with a white cloth thrown over its face. “I have three dogs at home and they’ve never hurt anything. Words don’t change that.”
“What if they change?” Linna asks. “What if they ask for real food and a bed soft as yours, the chance to dream their own dreams?”
“I’ll try to give it to them,” the woman says but her attention is focused on the park, the dogs. “They can’t do this.”
“Try and stop them.” Linna turns away tasting her tears. She should feel comforted by the woman’s words, the fact that not everyone has forgotten how to love animals, but she feels nothing. And she walks north, carved hollow.
10. One Dog Goes to the Place of Pieces.
This is the same dog. She is hit by a car and part of her flies off and runs into a dark culvert. She does not know what the piece is, so she chases it. The culvert is long and it gets so cold that her breath puffs out in front of her. When she gets to the end there’s no light and the world smells like metal. She walks along a road. Cold cars rush past but they don’t slow down. None of them hit her.
One Dog comes to a parking lot which has nothing in it but the legs of dogs. The legs walk from place to place but they cannot see or smell or eat. None of them are her legs, so she walks on. After this she finds a parking lot filled with the ears of dogs, and then one filled with the assholes of dogs, and the eyes of dogs and the bodies of dogs; but none of the ears and assholes and eyes and bodies are hers, so she walks on.
The last parking lot she comes to has nothing at all in it except for little smells like puppies. She can tell one of the little smells is hers, so she calls to it and it comes to her. She doesn’t know where the little smell belongs on her body, so she carries it in her mouth and walks back past the parking lots and through the culvert.
One Dog cannot leave the culvert because a man stands in the way. She puts the little smell down carefully and says, “I want to go back.”
The man says, “You can’t unless all your parts are where they belong.”
One Dog can’t think of where the little smell belongs. She picks up the little smell and tries to sneak past the man but the man catches her and hits her. One Dog tries to hide it under a hamburger wrapper and pretend it’s not there but the man catches that, too.
One Dog thinks some more and finally says, “Where does the little smell belong?”
The man says, “Inside you.”
So One Dog swallows the little smell. She realizes that the man has been trying to keep her from returning home but that the man cannot lie about the little smell. One Dog growls and runs past him and returns to our world.
There are two police cars pulled onto the sidewalk before North Park’s main entrance. Linna takes in the sight of them in three stages: first, she has seen police everywhere today so they are no shock; second, they are here, at her park, threatening her dogs, and this is like being kicked in the stomach; and third, she thinks: I have to get past them.
North Park has two entrances. Linna walks down a side street and enters the park by the little narrow dirt path from Second Avenue.
The park is never quiet. There’s busy Sixth Street just south, and the river and its noises to the north and east and west; trees and bushes hissing with the hot wind; the hum of insects.
But the dogs are quiet. She’s never seen them all in the daylight but they’re gathered now, silent and loll-tongued in the bright daylight. There are forty or more. Everyone is dirty now. Any long fur is matted. Anything white is dust-colored. Most of them are thinner than they were when they arrived. The dogs face one of the tables, as orderly as the audience at a string quartet, but the tension in the air is so obvious that Linna stops short.
Gold stands on the table. There are a couple of dogs she doesn’t recognize in the dust nearby, lying flat with their sides heaving, tongues long and flecked with white foam. One is hunched over; he drools onto the ground and retches helplessly. The other dog has a scratch along her flank. The blood is the brightest thing Linna can see in the sunlight, a red so strong it hurts her eyes.
The Cruz Park cordon was permeable, of course. These two managed to slip past the police cars. The vomiting one is dying.
She realizes suddenly that every dog’s muzzle is swiveled toward her. The air snaps with something that makes her back-brain bare its teeth and scream, her hackles rise. The monkey-self looks for escape but the trees are not close enough to climb and she is no climber, the road and river too far away. She is a spy in a gulag. The prisoners have little to lose by killing her.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Gold says.
“I came to tell you. Warn you.” Even through her monkey-self’s defiance, Linna weeps helplessly.
“We already know.” The pack’s leader, the German Shepherd, says. “They’re killing us all. We’re leaving the park.”
She shakes her head, fighting for breath. “They’ll kill you. There are police cars on Sixth. They’ll shoot you however you get out. They’re waiting.”
“Will it be better here?” Gold asks. “They’ll kill us anyway with their poisoned meat. We know. You’re afraid—”
“I’m not—” Linna starts but he breaks in.
“We smell it on everyone, even the people who take care of us or feed us. Even you. We must leave.”
“They’ll kill you,” Linna says again.
“Some of us may make it.”
“Wait! Maybe there’s a way,” Linna says and then: “I have stories.”
In the stifling air, Linna can hear the dogs pant even over the street noises. “People stories are only good for people,” Gold says at last. “Why should we listen to yours?”
“We made you into what we wanted; we owned you. Now you are becoming what you want. You belong to yourselves. But we have stories and we learned from them and maybe they will help you. Will you listen?”
; The air shifts, but whether it is the first movement of the still air or the dogs shifting, she can’t tell.
“Tell your story,” says the German Shepherd.
Linna struggles to remember half-read textbooks from a sophomore course on folklore, framing her thoughts as she speaks them. “We used to tell a lot of stories about Coyote. The animals were here before humans were, and Coyote was one of them. He did a lot of stuff, got in a lot of trouble. Fooled everyone.”
“I know about coyotes,” a dog says. “There were some by where I used to live. They eat puppies sometimes.”
“I bet they do,” Linna says. “Coyotes eat everything. But this wasn’t a coyote, it’s Coyote. The one and only.”
The dogs murmur. She hears them work it out: Coyote is the same as This is the same dog.
“So. Coyote disguised himself as a bitch so that he could hang out with a bunch of other females just so he could mate with them. He pretended to be dead and then when the crows came down to eat him, he snatched them up and ate every one. When a greedy man was keeping all the animals for himself, Coyote pretended to be a very rich person and freed them all so that everyone could eat. He—” She pauses to think, looks down at the dogs all around her. The monkey-fear is gone. She is the storyteller, the maker of thoughts. They will not kill her, she knows. “Coyote did all these things and a lot more. I bet you’ll think of some too.
“I have an idea of how to save you,” she says. “Some of you might die but some chance is better than no chance.”
“Why would we trust you?” says the mastiff-cross who has never liked her, but the other dogs are with her. She feels it and answers.
“Because this trick, maybe it’s even good enough for Coyote. Will you let me help?”
We people are so proud of our intelligence, but that makes it easier to trick us. We see the white-truck men and we believe they’re whatever we’re expecting to see. Linna goes to U-Haul and rents a pickup truck for the afternoon. She digs out a white shirt she used to wear when she ushered at the concert hall. She knows clipboard with printout means official responsibilities, so she throws one on the dashboard of the truck.
She backs the pickup to the little entrance on Second Street. The dogs slip through the gap in the fence and scramble into the pickup’s bed. She lifts the ones that are too small to jump so high. And then they arrange themselves carefully, flat on their sides. There’s a certain amount of snapping and snarling as later dogs step on the ears and ribcages of the earlier dogs, but eventually everyone is settled, everyone able to breathe a little, every eye tight shut.
She pulls onto Sixth Street with a truck heaped with dogs. When the police stop her she tells them a little story. Animal Control has too many calls these days: cattle loose on the highways, horses leaping fences that are too high and breaking their legs—and the dogs, the scores and scores of dogs at Cruz Park. Animal Control is renting trucks now, whatever they can find. The dogs of North Park were slated for poisoning this morning.
“I didn’t hear about this in briefing,” one of the policemen says. He pokes at the heap of dogs with a black club. They shift like dead meat. They reek; an inexperienced man might not recognize the stench as mingled dog breath and shit.
Linna smiles, baring her teeth. “I’m on my way back to Animal Control,” she says. “They have an incinerator.” She waves an open cell phone at him and hopes he does not ask to talk to whoever’s on the line because there is no one.
But people believe stories and then they make them real. The officer pokes at the dogs one more time and then wrinkles his nose and waves her on.
Clinton Lake is a vast place, trees and bushes and impenetrable brambles ringing a big lake: beyond that, open country in every direction. When Linna unlatches the pickup’s bed, the dogs drop stiffly to the ground and stretch. Three died of overheating, stifled beneath the weight of so many others. Gold is one of them but Linna does not cry. She knew she couldn’t save them all but she has saved some of them. That has to be enough. And the stories will continue. Stories do not easily die.
The dogs can go wherever they wish from here, and they will. They and all the other dogs who have tricked or slipped or stumbled to safety will spread across Kansas, the world. Some will find homes with men and women who treat them not as slaves but as friends, freeing themselves as well. Linna herself returns home with little shivering Sophie and sad Hope.
Some will die, killed by men and cougars and cars and even other dogs. Others will raise litters. The fathers of some of those litters will be coyotes. Eventually the Changed dogs will find their place in the changed world.
(When we first fashioned animals to suit our needs, we treated them as though they were stories and we the authors, and we clung desperately to an imagined copyright that would permit us to change them, sell them, even delete them. But some stories cannot be controlled. Perhaps we started them but they change and they are no longer ours, if they ever were. A wise author or dog owner listens and learns and says at last, “I never knew that.”)
11. One Dog Creates the World.
This is the same dog. There wasn’t any world when this happens, just a man and a dog. They lived in a house that didn’t have any windows to look from. Nothing had any smells. The dog shit and pissed on a paper in the bathroom, but not even this had a smell. Her food had no taste, either. The man suppressed all these things. This was because the man didn’t want One Dog to create the world and he knew it would be done by smell.
One night One Dog was sleeping and she felt the strangest thing that any dog has ever felt. It was the smells of the world pouring from her nose. When the smell of grass came out, there was grass outside. When the smell of shit came out, there was shit outside. She made the whole world that way. And when the smell of other dogs came out, there were dogs everywhere, big ones and little ones all over the world.
“I think I’m done,” she said, and she left.
Publication History
“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,”Asimov’s Magazine, July 2008.
“Fox Magic,” Asimov’s Magazine, December 1993.
“Names for Water,” Asimov’s Magazine, October/November 2010.
“The Bitey Cat,” published here for the first time.
“The Horse Raiders,” Analog, May 2000.
“Dia Chjerman’s Tale,” Tales for the Long Rains, Scorpius Digital, 2001
“My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire—Exposition on the Flaws in my Wife’s Character—The Nature of the Bird—Her Final Disposition,” www.kijjohnson.com.
“Schrödinger’s Cathouse,” Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1993.
“Chenting, in the Land of the Dead,” Realms of Fantasy, October 1999.
“The Empress Jingu Fishes,” Conqueror Fantastic, Pocket Books, 2004.
“At the Mouth of the River of Bees,” SciFiction, September 2006.
“Story Kit,” Eclipse 4, Night Shade Books, 2011.
“Wolf Trapping,” The Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1989.
“Ponies,” Tor.com, November 2010.
“The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles,” Tor.com, July 2009.
“Spar,” Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2009.
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Asimov’s Magazine, October/November 2011.
“The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park after the Change,” The Coyote Road, Avon Books, 2007.
Acknowledgments
Many years of writing short fiction means that I have had the opportunity to learn from a lot of people, too many to list. I would like to specifically acknowledge the following people, who helped significantly with these particular stories.
Editors: Neil Clarke, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Tappan King, Shawna McCarthy, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Kris Rusch, Pamela Sargent, Stan Schmidt, Jonathan Strahan, Sheila Williams, and Terri Windling; and Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link.
Muses: Ed Bryant, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Samuel Delany, Bob Howe, Lucy Huntington, Peg Ker
r, John Kessel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Chris McKitterick, Irene Michon, Lane Robins, Vivi Trujillo, Eric Warren, Barbara Webb (especially Barbara Webb), Connie Willis, the students and faculty of North Carolina State University’s MFA program, my own students, and ten thousand cafés au lait at innumerable coffee shops.
Finally, I owe more than I can say to James Gunn, who taught me as much as anyone could about writing science fiction.
About the Author
Kij Johnson’s short stories have received the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards. Her novels include two volumes of the Heian trilogy Love/War/Death: The Fox Woman (which received the Crawford Award) and Fudoki. She is currently researching a third novel set in Heian Japan; and Kylen, two novels set in Georgian Britain.
She taught writing and science fiction writing at Louisiana State University and at the University of Kansas. She has run chain and independent bookstores and has worked at Tor Books, Dark Horse Comics, Wizards of the Coast, Microsoft, Real Networks, as well as worked as a radio announcer and engineer, edited cryptic crosswords, and waitressed in a strip bar. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and is an Assistant Professor of Fiction Writing at the University of Kansas English Department.
Recent and forthcoming short story collections and novels from
Small Beer Press for independently minded readers:
Joan Aiken, The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories
“Wildly inventive, darkly lyrical, and always surprising.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
“Shining, haunting, mind-blowing tales”—Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories
