by Rosalind Margulies
When I was seven God came to me in a dream and told me that my purpose on this earth was to unethically breed dogs and it has been 45 years and I still know this to be true. He instructed me to purchase from Craigslist two labradoodles, a stud and a bitch I would not name, and to keep them in my fenced in backyard in cages so small they could barely move and only let them out to fuck. Eventually, He told me, the bitch would get pregnant and give birth to a litter of perfect little puppies and I would post them on Craigslist for $1000 each and use the money to buy more doodles. Dams with permanently distended nipples and with sires with prostatitis and BPH and cherry eye conceiving perfect little puppies with Merle coats and heterochromatic eyes and more neuroses than a Jewish mother. I would use the money to buy myself a website and name it HeritageKennels.com and on it I’d post stock photos of picture-perfect labradoodles I’d say were mine and caption them with made up names and links to fake clean gene panels I made in Photoshop and I’d list the puppies for $2000 a year cause I was Heritage Kennels now and who could tell me shit. I’d fill up my yard with crates stacked on crates until you could barely walk from one end to the other and I’d fill those crates with dogs. I’d breed the bitches four times a year and when they got too old to pup I’d take them to the edge of the fence and shoot them in the head and bury them on top of each other in holes without headstones. Eventually it would all start to crumble, the dogs I sold would develop anxiety disorders and heart disease and cancer and muscle and hip dysplasia before they turned four and people would catch on and there would be callout posts on FaceBook and one day a visit from animal control and I’d go to jail for a few months and have to pay some big fine to the city and all the salvageable dogs would be shipped off to rescues and the rest would be shot up with pentobarbital sodium and burned in the industrial incinerator at the dump the county over. But none of it will ever happen, not the crates or website or county dump, because I don’t have a backyard. I don’t even have a balcony. I live in an apartment, no pets allowed and only 300 square feet so no place to put the kennels even if they were. So I drift. My disability check gets dumped in my checking account on the first of every month and I use a little of it to buy cigarettes and when my landlord’s not around I open my apartment window as wide as I can and I smoke and look up at where the stars would be if there wasn’t so much light pollution around here. My sister invites me to come see her and Mom in Florida every couple years and sometimes I almost go. I take my medication most days and I steal steaks from the grocery store and hardly ever get caught. And time passes but not fast enough. One day I’ll die, maybe sooner than later if I keep buying cigarettes, and maybe when that happens I’ll go to heaven and all those dogs God told me about will be waiting for me right next to everyone else I ever loved and I’ll breed merle doodles for the angels. Maybe I’ll be reincarnated and next time I’ll have a house and four acres of land I’ll cover with crates and I’ll be able to afford to wrap it in a soundproof fence so no one ever complains about all the barking and maybe when I get that first dog off Craigslist I’ll give her a name, something sweet like Hazel or Bella or Lucy like the little terrier I had as a kid. Maybe I’ll put a blanket in her crate and maybe sometimes I’ll let her sleep inside with me. Or maybe I’ll come back as the dog. I guess I won’t know until it happens.
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Rosalind Margulies is a BASS & Pushcart-honorably mentioned American writer and aspiring Survivor contestant with work in or forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly, Soft Union, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere.
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