The Neighbors are Crazy

Abby runs around the corner to me crying, and the most horrible thing you can imagine, blood on your own child, galvanizes this rush in me, this sort of half-sprint-jog. I pick her up and there’s blood everywhere, she goes limp in my arms and I have to gather every inert limb and lift that sweaty, bobbing head of tears, my god the tears. I think for a moment it might be her eyes that hurt. I yell for her mother and rush around the side of the house and there he is, that rat-bastard canine Charlie, the Blake’s Blue Heeler. He stares me with one eye while he twists something around in his jowls, chewing, his pink tongue awkwardly manipulating the object until it slips out and falls to the ground. Just as he snatches it up I recognize the mutilated digit. I look at Abby’s hand, clinched in a bloody fist, and right in the middle, a gap, a blank space in that little rock fist just spewing blood.
I set Abby down, and approach the dog, which is treating me with complete indifference, and as I’m only a step away Charlie panics and swallows the whole god damn finger, like it's some table scrap I've come to retrieve. I didn’t even consider it. Every string of rectitude and understanding frays in my body and I beat that dog with licentious intent. I kick Charlie so hard he forgets where he is. He quickly curls up against the chain-link fence, white vinyl runners woven vertically through the fence to keep out prying neighbors eyes. Those slats keep blind the beating I deliver that dog. After the second kick it looks like Charlie might defend himself, a quick snap at the air. But then I kick his neck, the third strike, and Charlie goes a bit soft, whimpers maybe. I kick and I kick, for some time, until his shoulders and ribs are just a grey pulpy mess, a mound of dough in my yard.
I look at Abby and she just looks right back at me, she’s whimpering a bit but not crying, just the track marks of old tears and those sad eyes. I walk to pick her up and she runs inside to my wife. Where is my wife? I take long deep breaths and look back at the broken mess in the corner of my lawn and think, this was a long time coming. That finger and that dog; I should have known better.