The Beasts of Belladonna by Allen Gilbert;

Author:Allen, Gilbert; [Allen, Gilbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781639820771
Publisher: Slant Books
Published: 2021-10-09T19:20:54+00:00

Dog Days

THE CHIHUAHUA, PERCHED six inches behind the property line, had been yapping, every three seconds, for the past half hour. My wife and I were finishing our Sunday brunch on the deck. From behind her big sunglasses she muttered, “How do you say shut the fuck up in Spanish?”

Our new neighbor is a young Hispanic woman who does the weather for a local TV station. “Silencio,” I said. “More or less.”

“Silencio!” she shouted, more or less toward the dog.

But instead of retreating, it crossed the line and stood next to our garden shed. “Her electric fence isn’t working,” I explained. “The battery on the receiving collar must be dead.”

The tiny dog kept barking, thirty feet from us. It couldn’t have been much bigger than a good-sized squirrel.

“Silencio, you son of a bitch!”

“I think it’s a female dog,” I said.

That was a mistake. A big mistake. “How would you know?” My wife took off her sunglasses, glared at me, and slipped her bare feet into her Crocs. Then she limped across the back lawn and turned on the spigot to the garden hose that she uses to water her perennial beds.

“Bitch of a bitch!” she screamed, and, with the full force of the water, pinned the dog to the side of the shed. When it fell onto its back, she came closer with the nozzle and zeroed in on its nose. “Bitch of a bitch!”

Now she adjusted the nozzle to Jet Stream and started pushing the little dog back toward the property line, still aiming toward its head. She didn’t have to touch it, not even with her waterproof sandals. When she got it past the red training flags for the electric fence, she finally turned off the hose. The dog wasn’t moving.

“The premises are secure,” she smiled, baring the dentures she’s worn ever since her teeth were knocked out and her knees broken, in our own home. Our former home. Then she returned our dishes and silverware to the bamboo serving tray and brought them back into the house we’ve been living in for the past ten years.

The dog still wasn’t moving. But when I raised my eyes to our neighbor’s master bedroom, I could have sworn the curtains parted. Of course, that was impossible, since our neighbor lived alone and she’d been double-shifting on Weekend Weather after her new job in Atlanta didn’t work out last year, after she’d slunk back to her old one in South Carolina. Her salary couldn’t amount to much, especially now. I wondered how she’d been able to buy into Belladonna—even one of the patio homes.

When she’d introduced herself to the neighborhood at the poolside picnic on the Fourth of July, she’d said she’d gotten a Chihuahua for protection. They were pequeñas, but they were good watch dogs. She’d used the feminine adjective, pequeñas, while she’d laughed and tossed back her long, glossy hair. Nobody had said anything. I remembered thinking she was the kind of woman who makes grown men speechless and their wives just as speechless, but for a very different reason.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.