The grass rustling around it, the brown dog walked toward them but stopped a few paces away. The old dog did not look at it, as if it had forgotten it. It was the second dog—whose mouth, after the bitterness of the leaf, had returned to its own dull taste—that looked at the brown dog.The brown dog appeared weak and tired. It looked back at the second dog. “Sit,” the second dog said to it.

The old dog’s tail moved in the dust.

“Sit,” it said. “Sit if you like.”

The brown dog remained standing.

“It does not want to sit,” the old dog said to the second dog. “Let it be. It is grieving.”

“What for?” the second dog asked.

“What does one grieve for?” The old dog opened its eyes and looked at the second dog.

“For oneself,” the old dog said. “No?”

The second dog said nothing, but the ease with which it had been seen through stabbed into it. Its tongue lay heavy in its mouth, like a dead thing.

“Its kid died a few days ago,” the old dog said. “Under a truck. It sat by the little thing for two whole days, but eventually one needs to get up. But where does one go from there? So it came here. And here it is.”

The second dog remembered the three fawn puppies and wondered which of them was dead. Not that it mattered. Someone died all the time. That was that—unless it looked at the brown dog, looked into its eyes, and opened itself, allowed itself to see on the street a small dead puppy in a little pool of its own blood, allowed that image to press against its own eyes, and saw the dog beside the pup, and then the torn pup by itself, vanishing away slowly to a stain and then turning, in the sun and rain and under the cars that went by without knowing anything, to nothing.

Only then did the pup become real. Only then did the brown dog become real. But why look into its eyes? Useless, to bring a dead thing to life. The dead are for the dead.

“It has not sat down since it came here,” the old dog said, “not eaten a blade of grass, not spoken a single word. And there will come a moment—I don’t know when, or maybe I do—when its legs will no longer hold its weight, and it will shatter to the ground, and for a long time it will weep, and then it will sleep. When it wakes up, it will have forgotten everything.

“And I don’t care what stories anyone goes around telling,” the old dog continued, “that I hate dogs, that I punish them, that I kill them.”

“Are you sure it can get back on its legs again?” the second dog asked despite itself.

“You are a butcher,” the old dog said. “You and your ilk. Knife in hand, striking at everything that does not fit your narrow eyes. What do you know about healing? Why don’t you try healing it? When your fate turns upside down, it becomes your fate to be toyed with by everyone.

“How do you think you would console it? By telling the truth? And what might that be? A good lie is, any day, better than the truth. Even more so because—who knows the truth? Walking around with pups half your age, putting your wretched weight on them, eating away at whatever happiness might come their way. I hope you don’t think that is the truth.

“Its kid dies, it comes here—for what? So I can ease its heart? Lighten the burden of a dead puppy? Do I have some magic here? Does God sit by my side and leave me magic bones? Besides, I need my own consolation. But you wouldn’t get it. You are just a bitter old dog peeing on other people’s bones.”

“Let’s move on with it,” the old dog said. “I don’t think you came here for nothing. Seems to me you are dying. Are you? Your face is pale, and light has left your eyes. Your hair is shedding too. You don’t have much longer. Is that it?”

The second dog looked at the old dog in a light that seemed to have dimmed.

“You don’t want to move, do you?”

“Maybe,” the second dog said. “But that way, shouldn’t you have died a long time ago?” The old dog laughed.

“You still haven’t learned anything, have you? You simply say what comes into your mind, like a pup born last week.

“Maybe I am dying, or even dead. Do you think everyone dies the same way? You don’t still think it’s those wretched hiccups, the closing of eyes, and lying there like a stone, do you? If only dying were so easy.” 

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Photographed by Christiaan van Heijst

Written by Zahid Rafiq