I

“You know—I used to have a dog—before you came about—” The branches creaked under each of his floundering steps. He had once again lost his way and the plot, and, like an old horse mechanically returning home after forgetting where he was headed, launched into one his well-trod anecdotes. My ears were already splintering. He used to have a dog, a German Shepherd, called Cerveza—Spanish for Beer, though neither him nor the dog spoke Spanish—and my mother had nearly forced him to give it up, because she’d heard that dogs are too dangerous for babies. In the end, the dog had simply died in an accident, the day before I was born. But his own way of telling the story was more tortuous, or torturous. So, while his hollow hooves rattled on the floor, in search of stables in the middle of the forest, my sleepy mind wandered.

I had never liked dogs. They were too sticky, too clingy, with beady eyes and dirty feet. The whole species smelled of carnival disaster. Much of them looked to me like a graft between a fish, a fuzzy pillow, and an Edwardian family after seven generations of inbreeding. But I did wonder if I would have become accustomed to them if I had grown up with Cerveza. My father counted my age in dead-dog years: he did not say that I was twenty-one years old, but that it had been twenty-one years since Cerveza had died. In his head, and somewhere in that forest, there was a dog-shaped hole where I felt buried. 

Every year, on my birthday, we headed into the same woods, and he gave the same speech. “You know—I used to have a dog—before you came about—.” There is inanity in repetition. I dimly thought that he was growing paranoid. Maybe he hoped that if he successfully drove me crazy, I would confess to Cerveza’s murder, somehow perpetrated from the womb. There was never any resentment in his tone, but I had come to feel that I had taken his dog away from him. He had never had the chance to choose between Cerveza and I.

As we walked in the forest, I sometimes smelt faint clouds of wet fur and stale kibble, clumps of auburn hair fell to the leafy floor, and the trees barked. But wherever I turned, I could see no dumb beasts—besides my father and myself. In fact, the woods were near empty. The grouses and the lynxes had fled their haunts over the years, and even boars could no longer be trusted to hunt and charge lost hikers. 

After a while, I had started feeling Cerveza growing in me, his hungry limbs fitting in the empty recesses of my own. I had been living in his ghostly company for twenty-three years, after all. He had settled in the back of my brain, read my mind, and dog-eared his favorite passages, treating me as if I were his portable Montaigne. Whenever he grew sick of pacing around, he scratched awful doggerels into the base of my hypothalamus. Once, his paws ran me into a dried-up stream; I jerked around in the wet silt like a loose firework on the Fourth of July. 

My father would often forget my name, and call me Cerveza. He whistled when he needed me, and growled when I was sitting in his folding chair. He was a strange bird. 

Each of these meandering hikes took us to all the places the dog had loved: the pinus sylvestris at whose knotty feet he used to pee, the Gneiss slab he used to lick… My father pointed at these great artefacts and scrupulously recounted the major events of Cerveza’s life, like tourist guides told Napoleon’s story at the Invalides. 

The first time we reached the tomb, I tripped on it and fell into a tender cloud of nettles hugging the camouflaged little headstone. Prickly situation. Everything was overgrown; too many nettles, too much of my father’s attention. 

Every year, we sat on each side of the tomb and picnicked with Cerveza thus sandwiched between us. 

II

This time, while my father plodded on laboriously through his habitual story, the wild earth tore open beneath my feet, and a mute rift swallowed me. I fell into a soft, furry, musky nook—the belly of the beast. A centaur Saint-Paul knocked at the door of my hide, and proclaimed with a cavernous voice that I had sinned against all caninity. Nobody had warned me that only dogs are allowed in heaven, plus the lucky few blessed by the love of one such glorious creature. And horses guard the perimeter. 

The holy father appeared, summoned me into his court, and listed my crimes: coming between a man and his dog. A little on the nose, if you ask me. 

I was standing before a sad army of raggedy Angoras and surly Siamese, likewise awaiting judgement, but I did not bother to ask what they had done. Hell was full, and Saint-Paul decided to send me back to my hearth—save a few changes. I kneeled before him, he put his hoof on my head, and I closed my eyes. When I re-opened them, I found myself, once again, in the woods.

III

My father had kept tramping onwards, not noticing my disappearance. His anecdote was going swimmingly—he had reached its third turn. He was also smelling uncharacteristically warm and happy. The empty woods, too, had changed; they now teemed with squirrel funk and stag piddle. I put my nose to the wind and bit in the feast of scents. I felt everything more keenly; the ground, the air, joy and despair. The world was not my oyster—the mere thought turned my stomach—, but it looked exhilarating enough. 

When we finally arrived at the tomb, however, something was off-kilter. The be-nettled headstone read: “Camilla, 1996, Born in Heaven.” My father rewound his clock: “You know—I almost had a daughter—after you came about!”