The Book of Dog Read online

  The Book

  of

  Dog

  Lark Benobi

  v

  Vegetablian Books

  Santa Cruz, CA

  @copyright 2018 Lark Benobi

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced

  or transmitted without prior permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9996546-2-0 ISBN-10: 0-9996546-2-4

  First Vegetablian Press Edition September 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  for you

  I have no idea who these women are. No idea.

  #45

  Contents

  Prologue: The Ballad at the End of Time

  The Ballad at the End of Time

  Book One: The Night of the Yellow Puff-Ball Mushroom Cloud

  In the Beginning

  Mary Mbwembwe Says Good-Bye to a Very Old Friend

  Josefina Guzman Meets a Suspicious Fox

  Stella Steals Some Kitchen Shears

  Margie Peach Follows a Giddy, Blood-Lust Scent

  Major Eureka Yamanaka Does Her Duty

  Wanda Lubiejewski Learns the True Meaning of the Word “Homewrecker”

  Book Two: Therianthropy

  Margie Peach Learns All About “Agent-T”

  Josefina Guzman Disturbs a Perfectly Round White Stone

  Stella Buys a Pack of Hostess Donettes

  Wanda Lubiejewski’s Daughter Grows Up

  A Prayer of Thanksgiving

  Book Three: Signals & Signs

  Major Eureka Yamanaka Ponders Acts of God

  Mary Mbwembwe Meets Margie Peach and Does Not Know Her

  A Cry of Triumph

  Josefina Guzman Watches ‘Noticiero Telemundo’

  Book Four: Collapse & Confusion

  Stella Acquires a Pocket-Sized Pink Bible, and a Cat

  Margie Peach Gets to Know Her Pack

  Making Friends in Time of Turmoil

  Major Eureka Yamanaka Catches a Glimpse of Josefina Guzman

  Mary Mbwembwe and Stella are Attacked by a Bird, or Maybe a Celestial Being

  Book Five: To the Abyss

  Mary Mbwembwe Draws on the Lessons of Her Past

  Wanda Lubiejewski Witnesses the Apocalypse from a Bear’s Perspective

  Fight Every Which Way You Can

  The Chocolate-Colored Lab Makes a Surprising First Impression

  Stella Meets and Old Friend in Unexpected Circumstances

  People Carrying Flashlights

  Book Six: The Land of Nethalem

  The Second Coming of Mary Mbwembwe

  A Procession of Beasts

  A Crow Comes to Josefina Guzman

  Josefina Guzman Rescues Wanda Lubiejewski from Her Wandering

  Why the Condor was Late

  Take Away the Stone

  The Coming of the Beast

  Kitchen Shears

  The End of the World

  Book Seven: Beginnings

  Parthenogenesis, Perhaps

  Prologue

  The Ballad at the End of Time

  The Ballad at the End of Time

  A girl decides to run away.

  She leaves her home on Judgment Day.

  The land is burnt. The road is wild.

  The girl is friendless, and with child.

  She finds the Land of Yellow Fog

  And there she meets a talking dog.

  “What’s happening?” the young girl said,

  “To make the land so burnt and dead?”

  “I can’t be sure,” the dog replied,

  “But possibly the Earth has died

  “Because we don’t deserve what’s good,

  And haven’t lived the way we should.

  “Good men automatically rose

  And went to Heaven; and all those

  “With sinful hearts were left behind

  To suffer anguish for all time.”

  The girl feels sad. Her feet are weary.

  She dislikes her dog-friend’s theory.

  On they flee through yellow fog—

  A pregnant girl, a talking dog—

  And soon they meet a magic bear

  Who gives them food, and combs their hair.

  The bear says,“Well, I don’t know why,

  But I must come with you, or die.”

  The three of them must travel north.

  And on their way, they meet the Fourth:

  A lonely, injured panther, who

  Has lost her friends, and family too.

  “We don’t have anything to share,”

  Says girl, and dog, and magic bear,

  “But maybe if we stick together,

  Our lives will change, and for the better.”

  They meet a goat. She greets the Bear.

  The goat has feathers in her hair.

  “You’re very late,” the old goat said;

  “What hope there was is nearly dead.”

  “I’m glad you’ve come at last, but wonder:

  Where’s our California Condor?”

  “Without that Bird, I fear the Beast

  Will vanquish us, from first to least.”

  “Hold on,” say bear, and dog, and girl,

  “Which Beast is this? Also, which Bird?”

  But just then, roaring, from the East

  Arrives the Seven-Headed Beast.

  “WORSHIP ME!” The foul Beast cries,

  And they all quake a bit, inside,

  And each of them begins to wonder

  If they aren’t doomed, without that Condor.

  The pregnant girl yells, “Come on, friends!

  Let’s fight this Beast until the end!”

  “While none of us are good, or brave,

  Or strong, or best in any way,”

  “And though we each are less than least,

  Together we can stop this Beast!”

  “Stupid girl,” the foul Beast cries,

  “Worship me, or else, you die.”

  The panther charges, and begins

  To climb the nasty monster’s shins

  Behind her climbs the mountain goat—

  She plans to gore the monster’s throat—

  And all fight bravely, tooth and claw—

  Alas, the Beast defeats them all—

  And, looking up through dying eyes,

  The dog, before the end, will spy

  A far-off condor, coming fast—

  She is too late. Her time has passed.

  They should be Six. But they are Five.

  And soon not one remains alive.

  He kills them all. It is their fate

  Because the bird arrives too late.

  ~ Anon.

  The Book

  of

  Dog

  Book One

  The Night of the Yellow Puff-Ball Mushroom Cloud

  Chapter One

  In the Beginning

  Woof Say All!

  Here is the story of how six unlikely women changed the fate of the world.

  In the beginning Mary Mbwembwe was making a cup of chamomile tea. Josefina Guzman was chasing a fox from her yard. Margie Peach was pumping gas into her car. Wanda Lubiejewski was plunging a stopped toilet. Major Eureka Yamanaka was hefting a briefcase into Marine Helicopter Squadron One.

  As for Stella King, she was unexpectedly pregnant with the unborn child of the Beast.

  It could have happened to anyone. The Beast was a creature of compelling and seductive disguises, and he was known by just as many names, among them: Lix Tetrax, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Chlorpyrifos, Metolachlor, The Anointed Cherub, The Dark Lo
rd, The Pernicious One, The Great Deceiver, and (his personal favorite) The Ruler of the Free World; and he had seduced Stella by disguising himself as a charismatic young Harley rider, and he had wooed her with the false promise of a carefree life spent riding on the back of his Soft Tail Fat Boy; and he had set in motion, with this pretty lie, the countdown to End Times.

  The Beast could fool the best of them, and he almost always got his way.

  But maybe not this time.

  Woof Say All!

  Chapter Two

  Mary Mbwembwe Says Good-Bye

  to a Very Old Friend

  Mary Mbwembwe was in the kitchen when the old woman died. She was making the old woman a cup of chamomile tea. By the time she came back the old woman was entirely gone. Mary Mbwembwe put the teacup and saucer down on the nightstand. She leaned over and kissed the old woman on the forehead. Then she dressed the old woman in her favorite robe, the peacock-colored silk one with passionflowers painted on it. She fixed the old woman’s hair. She arranged her arms into a tasteful impression of repose. She called the coroner, and after that she called the daughter. While she waited for the coroner and the daughter to arrive she cleaned the old woman’s home until it was spic-and-span. By mid-afternoon her job was done. The coroner had come and gone. The hearse had driven up and two somberly dressed gentlemen had zippered the old woman’s body into a bag and had taken it away reverently.

  The daughter looked up from her texting as if surprised to see Mary Mbwembwe standing there. She wrote Mary Mbwembwe a check for two hundred dollars. She had never liked Mary Mbwembwe, and she was behaving rudely now, barely looking at her, and handing the check over at arms’ length.

  By this time Mary Mbwembwe had been caring for the old woman for seven years, in a town called Hemet, in the California desert, not far from the border. It was a town mostly populated with elderly John Wayne fans and their caregivers. Mary Mbwembwe forgave the daughter for her abrupt manner. The daughter had just lost a mother, after all. It was natural to resent the caregiver in such circumstances. Mary Mbwembwe did not mention that two hundred dollars was less than she was owed, or that she would be sleeping in her car that night. A friend had written to say that a brand new nursing home had opened in a town to the north, a place where they paid minimum wage plus benefits. So she had a backup plan. The daughter watched her gather her things together to be sure no silver or crystal made its way into her bag. Mary Mbwembwe did not resent her for it. She did not complain. Her belongings were not complicated. She did not take long to pack. Her car complained, though, wheezing and belching as she backed out and drove away.

  Mary Mbwembwe would have gone to the old woman’s funeral but she was not invited.

  Just as she got on the highway and headed north Mary Mbwembwe checked her rear-view mirror, and in that very moment—in that casual, nostalgic look backward at her former life—she saw the beginning of all that was to come.

  It came in the shape of a strange, sullen-yellow cloud, far to the south, still close to the horizon but billowing upwards, as if spores had just been released from the biggest puff-ball mushroom in the world.

  The cloud didn’t look to her like ordinary smog. It looked sinister and alive.

  “Would you look at that,” Mary Mbwembwe said.

  Of course that old woman died a long time ago, so long ago that Mary Mbwembwe has since forgotten the old woman’s name. It was a time when new wars were popping up on every continent, and vast sheets of ice were falling into the sea, and a third of the trees on the planet were burning. Korea still existed. Burkina Faso still existed. Countries with borders and names still existed. People still had hands with opposable thumbs, for the most part.

  And on that day Mary Mbwembwe did not think of the world and its troubles. She was on a journey. The road was in front of her, not in her rear-view mirror. The sullen-yellow puff-ball mushroom cloud brooding on the horizon to the south would take care of itself, and if not, well then, there was no use worrying over what couldn’t be helped, because everything that ever happened in this world was meant to be.

  After reminding herself of all these things Mary Mbwembwe drove on with a hopeful heart.

  Chapter Three

  Josefina Guzman Meets

  a Suspicious Fox

  That same night, Josefina Guzman—who was, incidentally, a proud member of the Guzman branch of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe—began to climb a ladder to the top of a shipping container, which was resting, slightly skewed, at the mucky end of the San Francisco Bay, far to the north of the spreading yellow haze along the border. The shipping container had come to rest at the end of a dirt path, on top of a defunded Superfund site, near a sewage treatment plant, in a township called Nethalem, formerly famous for its small craft harbor. Long ago the harbor had silted in, and now the only remnants of the harbor were the carcasses of abandoned boats, no longer seaworthy, lying at angles in the reeds and mud.

  Josefina Guzman lived in the shipping container. She had set up a bed and a tiny table and chair for herself inside it. Also she had acquired some excellent Coleman-brand camping equipment, donated from the local parish. A stove. A torch. A catalytic space heater. Sometimes on clear nights Josefina Guzman would climb to the top of the shipping container to sleep, because the cool metal surface straightened out her back better than any chiropractor could. Also, she liked the view. Now that she had reached the top of the ladder she lay on her back and stared up at the sky. The moon was red and gibbous, and she cupped her hand under it, and imagined she was holding it.

  Josefina Guzman’s nearest neighbors lived in the village of Nethalem and their homes clustered around the little church, a dirt-path-mile away from her shipping container. Like her they were living in a flood plain, and barely scraping a living together, but they took care of her even so. Josefina Guzman was the parish’s adoptive hard case. The parish priest’s name was Father Juan del Rosario and he was from Argentina. Now and then Father Juan del Rosario would lead his congregants up the dirt path to Josefina Guzman’s place and they would pray with her. She had a reputation for wisdom that came with her withered sun-dried features. To add to that reputation she wore seagull feathers in her hair.

  It pleased her to live so close to the land. Of course the land probably belonged to someone, and the container too, and they would come one day and tell her to get lost. But maybe not. Maybe this was a completely abandoned container. And maybe the land was still classified as “water,” here at the silted-in edge of things, so no one could really own it or take it away from her. It made her happy to think that a patch of new earth had risen up spontaneously from the mud and had escaped being surveyed and seized by the government and parceled off to the rich and powerful. This bit of land seemed protected by an unseen force for good. Sometimes she could see that unseen force, as a matter of fact, shimmering at the edges of her vision.

  Or maybe it was her cataracts.

  A sifting wind flowed through the reeds and it made the moon seem heavier in her hand than a moment ago, so she let the moon go.

  Then it seemed as if she might have heard something in the reeds, something that whistled, or sang out.

  Something caught in Josefina Guzman’s heart.

  But when she tried to listen more closely—when she tried to be sure she had heard anything at all—she only heard a pack of coyotes howling over by the freeway, where a new fire had apparently broken out, the way fires do, and it made the horizon in that direction glow a dull and brooding shade of orange.

  Josefina Guzman decided she didn’t want to sleep outside after all.

  Just when both of Josefina Guzman’s feet were safely back on the ground, some shapes made their way out of the muck and reeds. The shapes were trotting toward her. Her eyes were bad and she thought they were dogs until they stopped right in front of her: a fox and three raccoons, traveling together. Their eyes glowed. They nodded their small animal heads wisely. Josefina Guzman half-expected them to speak. Next she wondered if they were rabid
. She wasn’t sure whether to step toward them boldly to scare them off, or to run away. Before she could decide, the fox let out a cry that sounded like laughter and the four creatures ran away together into the dark.

  “That’s right, scat, get out of here,” Josefina Guzman said.

  But she felt disgruntled to be so easily dismissed by these creatures. Also it worried her to be talking out loud to animals. She was worried for her mind, because she was old. It took her a long time to fall asleep, because she was afraid her mind would be even less clear in the morning, and that she would be well on her way to becoming a ridiculous old woman. When she finally did fall asleep she had a dream about two bears, and a panther, and a pack of dogs, and a young girl with a baby in her arms; and the girl said to Josefina Guzman: “I’m looking for a boy named Lix Tetrax, do you know him?” and Josefina Guzman shook her head and said: “What nonsense, now leave me alone;” but the girl would not go away until Josefina Guzman woke up in the dark, and then—even though to be alone was what she had wanted all along—she somehow missed the girl, and was sorry that the girl had left so soon.

  Chapter Four

  Stella Steals Some Kitchen Shears

  Stella’s part in the story begins in the town of Barstow, on the night of the Yellow Puff-Ball Mushroom Cloud, which was, coincidentally for Stella, also the night when she finally decided to run away for good.

  Stella was pregnant. Her mother was in jail. Her father was unknown. Her aunt would kick her out soon enough.

  So as soon as everyone went to bed Stella stuffed all of her money into her underwear: the fifty-seven dollars that she had saved up honestly, plus the three twenties from the baby’s father.