When Aunt Martha
leaves I watch Atlas.
Atlas is a Great Dane whose head
reaches the middle of my chest when he is on four legs. He is slow and
cautious, a shadow that lurks in the corner of my sight and watches me from
behind corners and the backs of hallways. For a long time Atlas does not
approach, does not trust me. He does not make a sound. His growl is low and shaking,
a rattling fear that crawls along lower spines like parasite spiders. In nights
when I sleep in the guest room of this unfamiliar home I think I hear it, but
in the mornings Atlas is silent, and I know I am imagining things.
Aunt Martha’s house is big and
lonely, deep into suburbia where she has cut herself off from familial
relations with her neighbors. Her house is full of photographs of a family that
has grown old and apart; sons who speak only through email, daughters who send
Christmas cards, pictures of grandchildren who she has only held once before.
They stare out of their glossy two-dimensional lives and look into the vast
now-emptied home that they left behind.
Atlas is in some of these pictures,
but he always looks the same. No grey hairs, sagging jowls or sad eyes from the
living shadow whose puppyhood is as ill-documented as the rest of his history.
My cousins do not talk about the dog when I see them, nor do any of them have
funny or cute stories which people so often consign to their animals. Instead
they shrug, change the subject and say that Atlas has always been around.
I come under the impression that Atlas
is not watching me out of suspicion but instead out of curiosity. As I water
the plants and clean the shelves I feel his eyes on the back of my shoulders as
a physical weight. When I turn I see a black silhouette retreat back into a
place unseen. I cringe and whistle my fears of Atlas away. Increasingly I
believe that he hates that I am here and am filled with the unnatural sensation
that I am not the master in this house.
He watches me while I eat, sitting
almost as tall as I stand, silently observing from across the room. I keep the
television and radio off because the hair on the ridge of his back stands up
when they speak. Atlas enjoys silence in his home, and in its totality he watches
me until I lock a door. From the other side of my sanctuary I sleep uneasy in
the knowledge that he is awake, sitting laying silently on a couch with his
eyes open; waiting for me to unlock the door so that he may continue his
persecuting vigil.
On the fifth day, he finally speaks.
His eyes, formally black-brown
opals, slide aside to reveal panels of shimmering white light. A horse moan
issues from his long mouth, a tantric chant that begins with a guttural grown
and crescendos in a man-like scream of rage. His meaty paws come down on my
chest, and in a moment I am paralyzed under him as his teeth come closer and
closer to my nose.
“Leave.”
And after that he is off of me. I
wonder the house in a daze, splashing water on my face from the kitchen sink. I
feel his stink still on me, and I wonder if this truly happened. I wonder if
Aunt Martha’s hollow estate is really a good place for my admittedly disturbed
mind. I had been told previously that the medication could wear off and that I
would be at the mercy of hallucinations if I was not careful in my routine
changing of my prescriptions.
My breathing is heavy and labored,
my hands shaking as stammering weeping comes out of my mouth. I had believed
that I had made real progress, that the doctors were right in saying that I
didn’t need any more treatments. I am on the verge of real weeping, remembering
that I had schedule interviews for the week I was to return from Aunt Martha’s.
Then I feel Atlas’ stare, and I
wonder if I have ever been anything but insane.
In a delirious moment, I imagine the
house is laughing with him. Then he shakes his head and leaves. I understand
how hopeless I truly am. I clutch myself and cry on the kitchen floor.
When I wake up, he is peering over
me.
He calls me horrible things,
obscenities and slurs that are so foul that they cannot describe a human being.
He tells me of the awful things he wants to do, the profane and abominable sins
he wishes to unleash on me, on the world. He dips his head to my ear and begins
to sing a song: He sings that the worm eats the man, that the worm grows the
dirt and that all things walk on a bleeding planet. I begin to weep and he
bites into my shoulder, telling me to stop my worthless screaming and that if I
will do one thing right in my life it is to listen when he speaks.
Atlas tells me of the world that has
been woven into ours, about the evil men that live under the clear surface of
water, the twisting snakes that crawl under the gnarled bark of trees. He sings
about the black planet that moves closer and closer into our solar system,
carnivorous and wide he says it will swallow us all. I feel warm and Atlas
roars with laughter.
Men, he says, are incapable of
dealing with fear in a rational manner.
I open my eyes and Atlas is gone,
the house is quiet.
Aunt Martha will be home tomorrow…
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