"Gossamer"

My glass eyes gaze blindly at the wallpaper in the bedroom and my ears remain perked, a snapshot of eager patience. Around my cold neck remains a plaid collar, a heart-shaped, gaudy nametag engraved "Gossamer" dangling from it. My paws remain planted in front of me, nails that will never grow again glimmering a dull black when the lights come on.

I cannot see you, but the artifical eyes you meticulously selected shine back at you with the same hue they had in life. I cannot smell you, but my nose remains pointed at you, as if seeking the familiar scent of your cologne. The heart no longer in my chest aches when you walk past without stroking my head.

I was your best friend, or I hope I was. You were my best friend. I was eating something dead when you came across me, all bones and sores, and asked the bearded man sitting in his old rocking chair about me. He looked up at you, probably wondering what someone young and full of future was doing in a run-down Virginia town. I guess I wondered that, too; once upon a time I was loved, but the memories are bleary, well before I lost my puppy teeth and puppy ears and wagging puppy tail, and this town has been my purgatory since I learned how to bite. I don't remember why you were there, something beyond the understanding of an animal.

"We just call that one Doggy," the man drawled. I felt an ear twitch at the name. I don't know what these words mean but I know that I'm "Doggy," and I know usually it means I'll get something to pad out the bones displayed on my emaciated body, so I look up. "Heeere, Doggy-Doggy-Doggy," comes the pitchy voice, and I trot up to the bearded man. I get nothing in return and trot back to the side of his trailer, lift my leg, and get a beer bottle thrown at my head.

My eyes linger on you, the unfamiliar stranger, before I trot away to go back to pulling the intestines out of a squirrel.

You come back at night and lure me with deli meat. I follow you to your car. It's older than you are and smells like acrid smoke, but I don't care. I'm used to the smell of smoke; yours smells cleaner, more expensive than the trailer park's. I hop into your back seat and curl up, smacking my chops and salivating down my rough coat as I make short work of your bait.

I look up at you with admiring brown eyes. You hold out a gloved hand. I can't tell if I'm supposed to lick or not, so I just tenderly rest my head in your leather-clad palm. You stroke my chin and I decide you're my best friend.

"I'll name you Gossamer," you say one day, some cold day, washing my irritated, flea-bitten body with your hands. Cold, but not as cold as outside, and softer than the concrete I used to sleep on. I try to lick your forearms as you wash me. I'm grateful. I'm so, so, grateful. I want to be your best friend, as Doggy, or Gossamer, or anything else you call me. It's a soft name for such a rough dog, I hear someone on the phone say, but I think I'm soft for you, even if I'm rough to them.

I don't get any less ugly with time. I'm crude and I'm your dog before I'm anything else. I cough up foam in the living room and I bring you dead rodents from outside if you let me off my leash. Your friends don't like me because even when I'm nice to them I'm still cold, colder than a dog should be, and why couldn't you just get one from the shelter? Why did you have to pick this finicky, one-person mangy thing from a trailer park? I hear them scolding you and when your sad eyes meet mine I feel some type of guilt. I don't know what to do, so when they leave I bring you the tattered sheep and squeak it, resting it in your lap and not moving my head. You let out a watery laugh and pet my head. I don't understand.

What I do understand is the pain in my insides. What I do understand is the way every time I open my mouth to yawn, something painful and dark comes up. Eventually I can no longer walk. I don't know how long I've been your dog. You've been my best friend since I was a puppy, and I just didn't know it yet. I was your dog, born to an unspayed bitch with an untrained mouth of teeth, beaten and sprayed and cussed at, but born for a purpose all along.

I don't have a tail to wag. I think I remember a big, bald man, tall and wiry but with less teeth in his head than a newborn puppy, holding me down by the throat and cutting it to the base while I cried, and then my ears were gone, too. I wonder if it had something to do with the time between puppy and dog where I had my snout duct taped shut and was thrown into the gaze of a beaten pitbull looking for its revenge. Regardless, I push my nose into your palm and lick, the salt of sweat on my lethargic tongue. I don't know why you're crying. I don't know why the veterinarian is talking to you like this. I just know I want to go home and fall asleep in your bed again.

I remember your arms around my shoulders and then nothing.

You took me home and gave me a second life. I peer at you through glass eyes that aren't my own, and I wish I could twitch my nose to soak up a bit more of your cologne. I wish I could stick my long-gone tongue out and lap the tears off your cheeks. Your friends won't go in your bedroom, because of that creepy taxidermy junkyard dog, and I wish I could snap at their fingers again.

A part of me thinks they're right, though. I was born into a pile of shit and trash, striped and scarred with sores and mange and fight wounds. Alive or dead or somewhere between, I was a terrible best friend. My teeth were too yellowed and sharp and to love me is a full-time job. Occasionally I wish it happened a year or two earlier; poison in a pile of meat outside someone's garbage can, or maybe that the redneck who used me as bait would've done it one more time, the last time, and you'd never have to carry the weight of an 80-pound dead dog on your heart.

But I am a selfish animal, a low creature that was born to love and do nothing else, and I failed at that, too. I can't help it. I look at you through these glass eyes, the ones you spent hours looking at on your laptop screen, just to make sure those were "Gossamer's eyes," and I wish you would look back at me. I wish I could press my nose to your palm, but by now it is dry and no colder than the rest of me. Please, just run your hand along the long-dead hide covering my cotton innards, even if I can't feel it. Even if my nerves are long-dead, please, slide your fingers in the space between my throat and my collar and tell me I'm your dog, that I'm your puppy.

I beg, and I beg, and I beg beyond my grave, remind me that I'm your best friend, and you do. Your fingers find purchase under the dull plaid of my collar and you kiss my dead nose and cry and even though it's all I want, I wish with all my heart I could come to life and tuck the tail I don't have between my legs. To bow my head to you in apology for the space my cadaver occupies. I love you, I love you so, so much, with the heart no longer in my taxidermy chest.