In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae

Author:Shane McCrae [McCrae, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780819577115
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2016-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

4

The house immediately to the right of my house if one were facing my house, having just walked home, bleeding, from a fight on the playground at the school across the street, was a rental. My grandparents often pointed this out to me as a warning. And I understood they meant that the families who lived in the house, never for longer than a year, had less money than my family did. And I treated the house and its backyard like they were empty even when they weren’t.

Usually, the families who lived in the house immediately to the right of mine didn’t have pets. But once, a family with a dog lived there, a small dog, it seemed small to me even when I was small, but it was probably about half my size. I used to play with the dog beneath the fence that separated our yards. I had dug a hole between our yards, or the dog had, and I would stick my hand under the fence and throw things for the dog to fetch. This was the first dog I ever tortured, and it might have been the last—I can’t recall torturing another dog after it, but my cats before, and a small bird after—and I stopped harming animals altogether when I was about eight or nine years old, and this, the dog I’m remembering, torturing it, must have happened when I was six or seven. One day, for no reason, I don’t think I had a reason, the dog had never hurt me, I grabbed a length of lead pipe, and called the dog to the hole, and when it stuck its nose into the hole, I smashed the end of it with the pipe. This is what I remember most clearly about the dog, this and not the dog and I playing—smashing the dog’s nose again and again with the pipe, eventually the end of the pipe, which was about two inches in diameter, jamming it at the dog’s nose, and the blood, the dog snarling, its teeth bared, biting the hole.

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