The dog was always bringing things back home from the woods – sticks, lost gloves, the bones of luckless animals that had succumbed to inattentiveness or the lack of a survivor’s reflex – and she would leave them at the door for Ethan.
This time she brought back a human hand. It had been gnawed, partly eaten, though not by the dog. Other animals, those of the wild, had found it and explored its edible qualities. The dog had simply found it and brought it to the front door.
Ethan was shocked when he saw what the dog had retrieved. The shock was greater, though, when he bent to pick it up and saw he was missing a hand.
*
The remainder of his day was characterized by awkwardness and frustration. A right-handed man, and the right being the one that was missing, much of what he did daily was suddenly difficult. He spilled his coffee several times by reaching with the wrong hand, the one that no longer existed. Operating a phone was awkward with only one hand and five digits, all of those unfamiliar with such activities since they were rarely used in this way.
Still, the day made its way to its end and evening arrived, with new difficulties related to making a meal and cleaning dishes, and soon it was night with its attendant hardships involving television and a remote. Eventually, however, it was time for sleep and Ethan went to bed – puzzled, frustrated and harbouring a sense of resentment for the dog for finding the hand.
When morning arrived, Ethan rose from bed and immediately fell to the floor. Painfully, having fallen awkwardly, he looked and saw he was missing a foot – the left.
In a corner of the bedroom the dog gnawed away with canine focus.
Stumbling, Ethan got off the floor and went to the dog but she quickly stood and circled out of his reach fully aware he wanted her prize. She was unwilling to surrender it.
*
Later in the morning, having waged a battle with his clothing but finally fully dressing himself, Ethan went outside. The dog accompanied him to the door. Once it was open, she leapt out and dashed off for the woods.
When she returned this time it was with an arm. Ethan’s spirits deflated. He had no need to look. He was missing an arm now.
It puzzled him that he felt nothing. There was no pain. There had been no sense of being relieved of his appendages. They were simply gone. Two of them had been found by the dog in the woods and brought home.
An avowed atheist, Ethan did believe in a universe that judged and felt he was being judged. There had to be a reason for what was happening. But what could that reason be?
He was the sort of man who had to have reasons. He required explanations for how the world operated. Without reasons, everything was absurdity.
*
Evening came and despite his abandoning physical parts, Ethan doddered into it.
He stepped outside. Above, the sky was morose with cloud. Normally, he would take the dog for a walk at this time but the absent foot, lost arm and misplaced hand precluded that so he simply let the dog out to run. Again, she went to the woods.
Suddenly the air was cacophonous with the sound of barking dogs. In hobbling fashion, Ethan headed toward the sounds. He stepped past the periphery of the woods into them, following the barks. One was clearly his dog, but what were the others? It sounded like several dogs.
It was. Balancing against a tree, Ethan stopped. Before him stood his dog, poised and alert, assertive and barking and before her were several dogs, one forward, the others behind. Experts were not required to see they were barking at Ethan’s dog in warning. They were telling her to back off.
The focus of all the commotion was where one of the dogs, the leader, stood over something. That dog, too, was barking. It was also growling and baring teeth, teeth that were bloody.
Ethan’s dog eventually took their meaning but did not retreat. Rather, she sat down where she was and watched and waited.
The pack’s lead dog, wary, bent down again at what it had found and began tearing.
The setting sun eventually dropped below the cloud bank and for a few moments rays of orange light stabbed through spaces in the trees, one of which found the lead dog and its prize.
Ethan blinked. It was a one-armed torso.
Briefly he wondered, “What happened to the legs?”
Then he looked down at his own torso, which was not there, and he understood instantly that none of him was there. He no longer had substance. Whatever he had bodily been, the dogs now had. Ethan was pure Ethan now; he was Ethan and only Ethan.
Without a physical dimension however, how could he continue as Ethan? He understood he could not. He had become memory.
Memories, he knew, fade into nothing.
* * *