The Wild Things COMPLETE

Chapter One

In the summer of nineteen-eighty-seven, my dog died, and it affected my childhood more significantly than anything that had come before or since. I was eleven years old and I lived with my parents in a white two-story Georgian style house that fronted onto a busy main road. Our backyard was a flat stretch of well-manicured grass that opened onto a small forest. There was no fence. As you can imagine this setting was Heaven for a little boy. I spent the long hot days of summer playing back there but never venturing too far into the woods for fear of being scolded by my father. Due to the traffic on the main road, I almost never played on our front lawn. I learned from an early age that balls and toys hit or thrown too hard could enter the busy traffic and be crushed by the cars, buses or huge eighteen wheelers that rushed by heedless of the small blonde boy just yards away.

However, for some reason that day, I was out on the front lawn when it happened. It seems strange now, but at that time it was quite normal for my father to open our front door and let our dog, Luca, out onto the porch to eat and drink. It never occurred to any of us what could happen... the tragedy that lurked just forty feet away.

I believe it was morning, not early but certainly not lunch time. I sat on the grass playing with something... marbles... army men... I can't be sure. But I remember the sound of the screen door opening, the harsh squeal of metal on metal and the stretching rusty spring... then a black flash zoomed past me. I looked up in shock to see Luca running full out, he hadn't barked, hadn't made a sound he just... ran.

A woman in a brown dress was walking a dog on the other side of the street, oblivious to the horror about to be visited upon us in the next few seconds. Luca entered the roadway and was struck instantly by a truck, its wheels bounced brutally over his torso as the driver skidded to a loud shuddering stop... far too late.

I remember my father rushing out onto the street and scooping up the dog. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth, its eyes were open and it seemed to be looking at me in a quizzical way. 'Why?'

The truck driver was sorry, he said as much and my father briskly answered, "It's alright, not your fault." Then it was over. Luca was dead.

My father took him away and I did not follow. I wanted to but I didn't. As much as I loved Luca I was too afraid to follow. I was a coward, always have been I suppose. I had not risen during all of this and I still held some useless thing in my hand, perhaps only fist full of dirt, I don't remember.

A man approached from the sidewalk, a stranger. He strode up purposefully onto our lawn and stood over me staring down. I looked up at him, he was average. The most average man in the world. His hair was brown, his eyes were brown, his shirt and pants were brown. He looked as if he was trying to blend in with the dirt or melt straight down into the ground and go totally unnoticed. As I looked up the sun seemed to move slightly so that it was directly behind his head, throwing his features into darkness and creating a corona of hazy light around him.

He spoke in a voice without accent. It was not deep like a man's voice or high like a woman's. It was just a voice and he asked, "Is that animal dead?"

It seemed such a strange thing to ask and such a strange way to ask it, that I wasn't sure how to answer. The fact of it was I didn't know. I was a child and death was unreal to me, something unexplored and unknown.

He waited patiently, not moving at all until finally, I nodded.

He turned then, without saying a word and for a moment, less than a moment perhaps, he was no longer a man. He was something else. He was black and featureless, like a shadow that had pulled itself up from the pavement. He had too many arms and legs and his neck was incredibly long. Then he was a man again and he walked silently past me into our backyard where my father had already started digging a hole in which to bury my poor silly, funny little dog.