Short Story Connects to Readers and Speaks to Universal Ideas

I am a bad dog. My pack tells me this all the time. When I hide Master’s socks—“Bad dog!” When Alice comes home to find the paper towel roll in shreds—“Bad dog!” When I growl at Nate for shifting his legs when I’m trying to fall asleep in his bed—“Bad dog!” And when I bit the neighbor across the street while Jenny was walking me—the loudest “Bad dog!” of all. Sometimes …

A Love for Words

Rachel Mayes, English education junior and author of this short story “Bad Dog,” won the 2017 Creative Writing contest. “I have loved words for as long as I’ve been able to speak them,” Mayes shares.

“This particular story, though simple in subject and style, speaks to universal ideas—the bond between a dog and his human, the pain of loving a creature who can disappoint or even hurt you, and, most importantly, the possibility of finding redemption.

Whether my readers are “dog people” or not, they are all flawed people, and I hope this story will remind them that even the most flawed of individuals can, like Rufus, be rescued from themselves and transformed into something greater.”

An Opportunity to Share

Each year, MBU offers a creative writing contest to any Maranatha student who wishes to develop and share his or her creative imagination. The winner receives  a check for $100 and a copy of Dr. Steve Stratford’s published book, Kate Canby and the Holocharm of Time, which inspired this contest. Dr. Steve Stratford served as a professor at MBU and as the director of institutional research from June 1996 until he went home to be with his savior in 2008.

“Writing contests allow people who love to write an opportunity to share their work with others who can gauge the quality of it,” explains Mayes.

MBU celebrates the creativity and imagination that students and future servants develop through this contest.

 

Bad Dog

I am a bad dog. My pack tells me this all the time. When I hide Master’s socks—“Bad dog!” When Alice comes home to find the paper towel roll in shreds—“Bad dog!” When I growl at Nate for shifting his legs when I’m trying to fall asleep in his bed—“Bad dog!” And when I bit the neighbor across the street while Jenny was walking me—the loudest “Bad dog!” of all.

Sometimes I nip my pack when we play tug-of-war, but not to hurt them. Just to play. But I meant to bite the neighbor. He yelled at Jenny for bringing me by his house. And he smelled like my first master, the bad master who reeked of sweat and Rottweiler. I hated the bad master, and I hated the neighbor for smelling like him. So I bit him. That is why I am a bad dog. Only bad dogs bite people on purpose.

As Master heads out of Nate’s room, I head in. My boy sits on his bed with his back against the wall and his arms wrapped around his knees. “Rufus,” he tells me, “you know you’re not supposed to bite.” His face droops from disappointment to something I like even less: shame. My boy is ashamed of me.

I am ashamed of me.

I trot out of Nate’s room, tail wilting. Master is in the big room with his phone to his ear. He talks on the phone a lot, mostly to people who list jobs in the paper. I lie down in front of him and start gnawing on my rawhide chew. He pauses long enough to frown at me. After he puts the phone down, he lowers his face until his eyes are looking straight into mine and says, “You are in big trouble, dog.” He’s told me that before. But this time sounds different. This time, he sounds sad.

I didn’t mean to make Master sad.

I don’t want my bone anymore.

The next day, Alice drags me to the vet. He has to test me for rabies, because if I have rabies, the neighbor across the street has rabies now too.

But I don’t have rabies, the bearded vet with his huge damp hands tells Alice. “Whatever his problem is, it’s not in his body. It’s in his head. He’s a shelter dog, right?”

She nods. “He was only about a year and a half old when we got him. Sometimes he growled or nipped, but we thought he’d grow out of it.” Alice’s voice sounds wet and shaky, like she’s going to cry. I hate crying; it reminds me of the other puppies at the shelter, howling and whining all night. “If we don’t get help for him, we’re going to have to put him down.”

“Put down” is what happened to the dogs nobody wanted to take home from the shelter. “Put down” is not supposed to happen to me. I whine, bumping my snout against Alice’s leg. She nudges me away.

The vet nods, quiet. He looks like Master does when he’s getting ready to try giving me a bath. “You know, I think I know someone who might be able to help.” He paws around in his desk until he pulls out a little rectangular card. He puts it into Alice’s hand, and she grips it tightly so it can’t slip out of her fingers. “If Sheril can’t make him better, I don’t think anybody can.”

Many days later, a new lady who smells like grass and unfamiliar dogs comes into the house. “Sheril, this is Rufus,” Master tells her. I jump right up on her, paws on her stomach, stretching to catch her face with my tongue.

She pushes me down. “No.”

I slink over to the corner. I was just trying to say hello.

Alice apologizes for me and tells the lady she can sit down. Master and Alice sit on the couch, but Sheril stays standing. “Is this the whole family?” she asks.

“The kids are in their rooms,” Master says.

“Could you get them, please?”

Once Nate and Jenny have come out, Sheril sits too and starts talking to them about trauma and boundaries and rehabilitation. Then she calls my name. I get up, even though I don’t want to, and trot over to her chair. She asks me to sit. I sneeze. “Sit,” she repeats, this time pressing her hand down on my backside. I have to sit. “Good boy,” she tells me. “Stay.” She gets out of her chair and goes over to my toy box, digging until she finds my rope toy. I grab the knotted end in my teeth and start yanking. She jerks back, and if I didn’t have to keep the rope in my mouth, I’d bark out of sheer joy. Tug-of-war is my favorite. But then Sheril tries to take my rope away. I bite down harder. She’s not taking it away.

“Give me,” she orders. No, I tell her in the only way I can, with a growl that rises up deep from the wild part of me.

“Give.”

With a whimper, I give in. “Thank you,” she says. Sheril turns back to the family. “Nate, Jenny, I’d like to talk to your parents now. You can go. Thank you for being patient with me.”

Once they’re gone, Alice looks nervously at Sheril and asks, “Well?”

“I can definitely tell Rufus is a smart dog,” Sheril begins. “He’s got a lot of potential. I don’t think his problems stem from cognitive defects; they’re learned behaviors that he can replace with better behaviors after extensive training.”

“What kind of training?”

“I offer two options. I can do six months of in-home obedience training sessions with the whole family with another six months of weekly follow-up.”

“That sounds like it’d be expensive,” Master comments. His forehead creases.

“I try to keep it reasonable, but it is an investment,” Sheril replies.

Master’s frown makes me think he doesn’t have room for an investment in the black book with the numbers. “What’s the other option?”

“For dogs whose families don’t have the funds or the flexibility for retraining, I do offer to adopt the dog. After several months of rehab, I place the dog with a new family.”

“So we wouldn’t get him back?” Alice asks, her voice small.

“I’m afraid not,” Sheril says.

Master sighs. All I can hear for a long time is three pairs of lungs breathing. Finally, Master says, “We’ll talk about it and let you know.”

Sheril scratches me behind the ears. “See you soon, buddy.”

Several nights later, Master is watching TV on the couch after everyone else is in bed. Alice doesn’t want me on the couch, but Master doesn’t mind. He lets me stick my head in his lap, and he rubs my belly when I roll over. But his eyes look wrong, the sad kind of wrong. “I really wish we didn’t have to do this,” he says.

The next day, Master and Nate and Jenny make me get in the car. Nate keeps me in the back seat, my short leash clutched in his hand. I wish he’d roll down the window, but since the time I tried to jump out of it, the window has stayed closed. Jenny sits in the front seat next to Master. Nobody smiles. It starts raining.

Nate stares out the window, and I see my chance. I leap up into the front seat, right by Master’s hand. Startled, he swerves. “Nate!” he snaps. “I told you to keep an eye on him!”

Nate drags me back. “Stay with me, Rufus,” he whispers. “It’s okay.”

We drive and drive and drive. Finally, the car stops in the driveway of a farmhouse. A tall fence circles the yard. “Jenny, help me get his things inside,” Master says. They disappear into the house. Now it’s just me and Nate, and then Nate starts crying. I whine, nervously flicking my tail back and forth. I really don’t like crying.

But I don’t like it that Nate is sad, either. So when he pulls me into his lap, I let him. I lick the warm, salty tears from his cheeks as he smoothes his hands over my head again and again. “You’re the best dog ever, Rufus,” he says through sobs. “I’m going to miss you.”

I lick his nose. Even though he’s hugging me so tight I can hardly breathe, I don’t growl at him. “I love you,” he tells me. He keeps saying it like it’s something he wants me to learn, like telling me to stay until I know what it means.

He’s still hugging me when Master and Jenny come back and open the door. “Sheril’s ready for him,” Master says, his voice tight.

Nate swallows. He puts the end of the leash in Master’s hand. “Bye, Rufus,” he says. He sounds like he swallowed the words too fast and now he’s choking on them. “You be a good dog, okay?”

I lick him one more time, then let Master walk me out of the car and up the path to the house. I have been a bad dog. I wreck things. I hurt people. But I can change. I will be a good dog.