DOG

By Burgos Iñiguez
 DOG
By Burgos Iñiguez

Despite knowing that it was going to rain, I took everything needed when I left home in
the morning, because I wanted to return from work walking, lurking some picture (I was
an amateur photographer, I still am). So there I was, well equipped, 6:00 pm, walking
under a heavy rain, unpredicted snow, and wind like invisible waves in the streets. It
didn´t take much to figure this was not going to be a picture´s afternoon, so I decided to
walked until the next bus station and go to the mediocre life I had. “Work takes the best
of your schedule for a reason, my grandfather used to say, to stop you from growing”.
Maybe a good book could save my cay, otherwise, news in television and eventually time
to go to sleep and rest for the same thing tomorrow. Shit.
At a point, I was walking parallel to a highway and the snow hit me everywhere, but I
resented it in the central part of the face, the one the hood doesn’t cover so you can see.
Suddenly I caught it. Out of nowhere, thirty ten feet from me. A dog. A medium size old
Dalmatian, standing in the edge of the asphalt, desolate yet undaunted in the face of the
storm. It took one second to understand the situation, and I got stunned by it. The dog was
watching the traffic, waiting for a suitable vehicle: a big one, even better with low
suspension, going too fast, heedless.

And the one came, very fast ended. An old truck with big spots of snow in the windshield.
I didn´t know what to do, I didn´t feel what to do. I wished the dog to look at me, not to
change its will, which would have been…disrespectful, but to see what there was in his
eyes. Wasn´t this act pure stoicism? Suicide tends to be pathetic among men, lame letters,
spectacular falls from roofs to streets full of people and so forth, but animals are
authentically transcendent in core aspects like it. They accept their reality, when is the
case, like this, and go away. I was pretty sure there was no fear of death or desperation in
those eyes. That same old fear that kept him alive all those year was now gone, maybe
even forgotten, and dye was the thing to do, just like that. It was dignifying to a point very
much higher than man, as far as I am concerned. Of course, he didn´t look back at me,
just swung, timing, and throw itself to the monster of iron coming in front of him. It was
grotesque but quick, and the hit sent the corpse sliding until the side of the road, very near
from where he was located in the first place. From my standing point of view, there was
no blood or parts out of place, so the sight wasn´t disgraceful. The rain didn´t touch it
anymore, neither the cold nor the suffering. As a matter of fact, it was like the dog was
not there anymore, at all. All its pain, cold, hungry, no more. That pile of bones and flesh
was just its house once, now empty.

The End