skonen_blades

Last night, I dreamed I was a wizard that looked like Walter White from Breaking Bad. I was visiting a younger, powerful wizard in modern day muggle earth. He was a naïve runaway teen with an okay heart who’d fallen in with gang members. They used his nascent powers for an edge in their dealings. He liked the sense of power but hadn’t yet gone to any serious dark side.

I was there because he claimed to have a pair of thestral dogs, spectral dogs that no one can see unless they’ve experienced true sadness. A lot of people claim to have these dogs but it’s usually bullshit. What would you think if someone claimed to have an invisible dog? The young wizard couldn’t see them but he had called me over to the concrete gang bunker where they lived to see if they were real and get a proper identification.

The dogs had followed him home and he had kept them. For a young wizard to have thestral dogs follow him home, he either had tremendous sadness in his future or was one of the most powerful wizards in existence and didn’t know it yet. Neither he nor his gang members friends could see them but they’d leashed them and kept them there and called me over.

I’d never seen a thestral dog. I was there out of curiousity and because the young gang members were starting trouble in my neighborhood. This was a chance to get inside and see their defenses as well as cement my reputation with them as the one in charge around here. By doing them this favour, I could still keep tabs on them.

The young wizard led me into the room where he kept the dogs. It was raining outside. The room was concreted and cold. The gang lived in an abandoned bunker. Graffiti lashed every surface.

Invisible leashes bobbed in the air in the center of the room, chains jangling.

Thestral dogs. And suddenly I could see them. They formed right in front of me. Large, grey deerhounds the size of direwolves. Damp, bony dogs with long hair. Happy enough to be there and happy to see me.

In my life, I’ve been through so much sadness.

In my dream, the wizard I was had also been through so much sadness.

Enough sadness to see the thestral dogs.

I walked closer to the dogs. They came up to me and nuzzled me. When they touched me, any sadness I had felt in my life was like nothing compared to the sadness that washed over me.

It was like sadness was a language and they were speaking it to me in the simplicity of dog. They knew I could see them so they knew I could communicate with them in the language of sadness. I got the full force of two thestral dogs happy to see me. I knelt between them, curling up on the floor, and they curled up with me.

It was like a transfusion of all the sadness life had to offer and more. I cried softly. The young gang member wizards looked on, worried.

Nothing mattered to me in that moment. I wasn’t just experience sadness, I was BECOMING sadness.

The purity and depth of that sadness is the saddest I’ve ever felt in my life.

But I woke up to Audrey crawling on my bed and Sonja beside me. I woke up as if from a catharsis. I woke up as if my sadness muscles were exhausted from a good workout and didn’t need to be used for a long time.

I feel as if it’s connected to the dream of love I had so long ago.

And I wonder what the next dream will be like.

I feel reborn today and very much in love with my friends.

And I have the day off to spend with my family.




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They played to their strengths. Steve was great at teaching the dogs to have manners and obey commands. Pierre was a wizard with the brush and scissors. The opened up a dog-grooming salon with an obedience training kennel in the back yard. They sunk all their savings into the place and business was great.

They called it Arf ‘n’ Arf.

My dog was a hairy cross-breed that came up to my armpits. The tangled dreadlocks of its matted hide stank of park-rolled carcasses. It was more of a bear than a mutt. It had more in common with a Sasquatch than a schnauzer. And he was willful. Not mean, exactly, but impulsive. If he wanted to eat, he chewed the door off of the kitchen cupboard and helped himself. When he wanted to go for a walk, he howled by the door until I relented.

I loved him. His name was Nate.

I took Nate to Arf ‘n’ Arf on Thursday. Steve and Pierre took one look at Nate and nodded in silence. They knew they were looking at their greatest challenge yet. If they succeeded in making Nate presentable to the public, he would be their masterpiece. Steve muttered that it would take some schedule juggling. Pierre said that it would take six days. They both said they’d do it for free if they could use the before and after pictures for their advertising.

I said yes. I went back to my apartment and cleaned it from top to bottom.

It took more than six days. It took four months. Steve and Pierre were both driven insane. They didn’t sleep. They started drinking. Every day only illuminated how much more work was ahead of them. Eventually, they obsessed themselves into bankruptcy. Steve moved out of town. Pierre left a cackling, tear-soaked drunken message on my answering machine that he was a failure. He went missing soon after that. No one’s seen him since.

They had each only completed half of their work with Nate when I picked him up. Steve had started at the front and Pierre had started at the back.

Nate no longer howled, barked, or begged. His front legs were now very well behaved. When he sat down, his front legs crossed politely in front of him. They didn’t scratch anything and they obeyed my every command. A cat could cross right in front of him and his front legs wouldn’t even twitch. His face, however, was still lost in a mess of twig-riddled, stinking fur. His front paws were still caked with mud. His unclipped, yellow claws ticked and scrabbled on the hardwood floor. The front half of him was still moist and dank.

His back legs were a different story. Pierre had indeed worked a miracle. From the tip of his tail up until his midriff, Nate’s coat was a dazzling amber. I had no idea that Nate was a redhead underneath all that garbage and feces-matted hair. His sleek, muscled body was perfectly defined by the lustrous coat of ginger. His tail arched out like a brand-new whip of red licorice. Those rear claws were perfectly manicured.

His back legs and tail still had no training, though. They would start to gallop if a squirrel happened by. They had a mind of their own. They obeyed Nate’s every passing thought. They lashed out at passing dogs. Nate’s legendary gas was just as bad if not worse. He still pissed on a whim wherever he was. His tail cleared every nearby table of glasses.

Nate turned into a wonderful walking contradiction of an animal. I loved him even more. I believe Steve and Pierre would have looked on him as a failure but in my heart I hope that they know that I think he was their greatest success.



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It’s a little ticklish when the needles go in but the anesthetic keeps her from moving. It keeps her laughing on the inside.

Grown from a vat of jaguar with a splash of greyhound and a swirl of human, she’s extremely thin and toothy. This is her last treatment before she’s shipped off to Overman Ranker’s Field Farms for training.

She’ll be part of an Assassin’s Guild nick-named The Circus. All of the killers are animal hybrids. The term ‘guild’ is a bit of a misnomer. ‘Kennel’ would be more accurate. The assassins are little more than happy pets that are conditioned to be stealthy and to kill without mercy.

An animal’s nose full of the scent from the victim’s clothing is much more efficient than a photograph/dossier when it comes to tracking a man down in the dark.

Tyrania is two years old. She’s either happy or in pain. No other emotions exist within her. The pain of punishment tells her what not to do. Right now, she’s happy. The spinal tap keeps her immobilized while the nano-somes do their knitting and pearling to the building blocks of her epidermis.

After training, she’ll be able to pass for human. The skeletal creature on the table with dark spots dotting the long, grey fur will become something more akin to feral super model when the process is finished.

She’ll be killing in the higher classes. It’s the bear-and-croc mods that they send to the poor places.

Her long nails are retracted and painted a garish red. The newborn killers always choose cosmetics that look like blood on their nails and lips. It’s comforting to them. It’s frightening to see them smile in the mirror after their first reward of makeup. More often than not, they’ve smeared a line of lipstick around their lips. Their eyes glass over with the dreams of blood as they tilt their head at their reflection.

They get trained to be human on the Field Farm. I mean, they get trained to kill people in any number of ways with the aid of mental downloads and grueling days of physical training but they’re also told how to act at the dinner table and how to keep a conversation going.

We teach them to be background. They’re expendable so there’s no exit routes planned when they’re sent on missions.

I miss the ones that don’t come back. I don’t like the ones that do. They change after a successful mission.

This one here, Tyrania, is looking straight up at the ceiling as I prepare the depilatory cream. I’m in her peripheral vision. I give her a wink.

I feel like a dentist operating on a child.



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It was like a hula hoop hanging in mid air. Looking through it, Todd could detect a little something that looked like a heat shimmer even though the lab was pretty cool. The hoop-gate didn’t hum which was odd considering the amount of power he was putting through it.

Two quarters lay steaming on the floor on the other side of the hoop.

A minute ago, Todd had thrown one quarter through the hoop. The quarter had hit the shimmer in the hoop with a light flash. There was a clink and then two quarters hit the floor on the other side.

Todd walked around to the other side of the hoop and picked them up. The quarters were cold to the touch but warming up to room temperature rapidly.

It was complicated but he thought that the coin had gone back in time, arrived in a multiverse with no corresponding time machine and been rejected. It had been bounced back to Todd’s time but because there had been no receiving machine on the other end in the past, the quarter could never have been sent. Therefore, the original quarter continued on its original path.

What happened was that reality rearranged itself to make this possible.

One quarter turned into two identical quarters.

Todd threw both quarters through the hoop back towards his desk.

Four quarters clinked onto the linoleum.

Smiling and with a wide-eyed chuckle, he went over and picked up the four quarters. He shook them in his hand like a high roller at a craps table.

Behind him, Fluffy lifted his head from the dog pillow and cocked his ears at the sound of the quarters clinking.

Todd tossed the quarters through the hoop again.

He heard a skittering of paws before shouting and turning too late to stop Fluffy from dashing forward. Fluffy was up for a game of fetch. She sped forward and leapt up through the hoop after the quarters.

There was a flash and the smell of burnt hair. Fluffy didn’t even have time to yelp.

A frozen, conjoined-twin, eight-legged, mockery of a dog landed wetly on the other side and slid up against the side of the waste basket, scattering the eight quarters. It lay steaming underneath the sun coming in through the window.

Todd shrieked.







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I opened up a plastican of ReBeef and turned the miniwave up to 6. A primitive sequenced meatload sizzled up to bloodwarmth in front of my eyes. Even though I was starving, the sight did nothing for me.

I hadn’t eaten anything fresh in over six months. I was forgetting what it was like to be running, to be one with the prey, to feel the life drain out of it with a bloody mouthful of throat, and to watch in almost meditative fascination as its movements slowed and it showered one rhythmically with arterial blood.

Always the same old smells on this tin can in space. Recycled air and dust. It made me feel like my nose wasn’t working. Instinct kept me checking my own scent tags here and there around the airlocks and control panels but there had never been an intruder. Old habits die hard. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, those humans said. Very true words. Humans had moments of brightness for such a tasty race.

I was starting to feel like one of those housedogs we saw on ‘Earth’. Still a comical name to me after all this time. So literal. No poetry. We put those monkeys out of their misery and liberated our retarded cousins. I suppose the only good thing those ‘humans’ did was kill most of the big cats on the planet and domesticate the rest.

I still had one of those ‘leash’ things pinned up above my sleeping cushion so that I could look at it in the morning and be thankful for the freedom of my race on Canus Prime. Those leashes had become a symbol on our planet after the first images had reached back home. The younger pups had added wearing these leashes to their rebellious repertoire of getting their ears pierced, grinding their teeth flat, shaving and doing drugs. Puppies. They’d regret that behaviour later.

I was one of the last ones back. I was being carried through underspace in a one-body doghouse. I had stayed behind to make sure the cleanup went according to plan. The company had paid me well and I was loyal to a fault if nothing else.

My robitch stopped being satisfying to me about three weeks into the trip. I longed to smell the stink of a lively well-fed kennel bitch with gold incisors.

Just six weeks to go and I’d be back on Canus Prime. My muzzle twitched at the thought. Fresh air, vegetation, and my old pack. Maybe we’d get together and tell tall tales. My tail stump wagged embarrassingly.

The miniwave rang loudly to let me know that it was ready. I drooled automatically at the sound of the bell. The gross ReBeef came out in my dish. I stuck my snout in and started to eat, hardship forgotten for a few minutes.



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