Dead End

The glow of the walls was getting brighter as Ore kept going. The tunnel was quiet, except for the trickle of water and the scuttling of crabs. Suddenly, he heard a low growling from the darkness. He hesitated, but decided to keep walking. The growling continued, when it was joined by a barking sound, much louder and angrier. Ore stopped and the sounds subsided for a little while, but as he started walking again, they were joined by a third whimpering one, a cacophony of fear, anger, and pleading. Since there wasn’t any way around it, Ore had to keep going.

When the source of the sounds came into view, he was shocked to see it was a three-headed dog. He had seen a two-headed goat before at the Coney Island Sideshow when he was little, a sad spectacle of a Siamese twin, however he didn’t think a three headed animal was even possible, especially with all the heads still alive and independent. None of the heads seemed particularly happy, and the dog didn’t look like it was willing to let Ore pass.

It kind of reminded him of Yuri’s dog, Tia. Back when she was through-hiking the Appalachian Trail, a young dog, barely older than a puppy, approached her one night as she made camp. The dog probably ran off from its owners and got lost, or maybe abandoned intentionally, the one thing that was obvious was that it was hungry. Yuri didn’t have much in the way of food, but ended up sharing a tortilla with her, which the dog devoured gladly. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Yuri named the pup Tia, short for Tortilla, and Tia followed Yuri for the remainder of the thousand plus miles of the trail. Yuri had provided for animals for as long as he’d known her. Various cats, dogs, even an iguana, passed through her care, as she tried to find suitable homes for them. Ore always wondered why someone so independent and frequently on the move, kept taking on so much responsibility, since finding people to take care of her wards was a recurring problem whenever Yuri felt she needed to go on another adventure. Ore suspected that she was deeply lonely.

People are hard to deal with. Everyone always thinks they know better. He could tell this always irritated Yuri, who also thought she knew better too, except in her case she was usually right. It was easier with animals. Language just complicates things. She was so different around her animals than she was around people, all mutual understanding and affection. But most animals don’t live very long. He recalled how distraught she was when her first cat died, and then the other less than a year later. After that, she didn’t keep any animal longer than a few years, finding them new homes before they got old and sick. How hard it is to love something and then lose it.

Ore thought about what to do with the three-headed dog in front of him. He didn’t much care for dogs, there was something coarse and repulsive in the sound of barking. Wolves don’t bark. It was an affect of domestication that brought out that trait, which was surely useful in guard-dogs, but became absolute and annoying as the world had become safer. Still, he knew enough from seeing Yuri interact with Tia to tell canine emotions apart.

He decided to address each of the heads in turn. The first one seemed scared. He hummed a song, almost a lullaby, which he heard Yuri sing to her dog. When she first found Tia, the dog was frightened from being days or maybe weeks on its own, and needed constant reassurance. So Yuri sang her an old song she had learned from her grandmother that seemed to soothe Tia, and before long it became their own little ritornello. Humming it now brought tears to Ore’s eyes, his voice quivered, but he kept going, and the growling slowly stopped.

The barking head seemed angry, but Ore suspected it was just hungry. It must have been hard to survive down here on nothing but crab meat. He found a small pit in the cavern floor and filled it with the milk from the black cow, and poured some of the granola, which he had trouble keeping down, and stepped back. The head stopped barking, came cautiously to the pit, and after sniffing it inquisitively, started to eat.

The third head continued its pitiful whine, a sound Ore knew too well. Though he didn’t share his hot take with many, Ore believed that almost all music is a form of whining. While there was essentially one major key, there were many minor ones, so it seemed as if Western music theory was built around the idea that there is one way to be happy, and many ways of beings sad. While most popular music was in major keys, there was also relatively little variety in it, as there were only so many melodic progressions possible, before one had to switch keys, and most of those had been already been used by the time humanity reached the Renaissance. In birdsong, it is the weak, drab birds that are the best singers, while the strong or crafty ones can succeed through their ability to hunt, provide, or build, so a beautiful birdsong is a kind of plea for love from a creature that has nothing else to offer. How lonely this strange creature must be to have lived down here so long.

Ore wasn’t sure what to do, but then remembered a video he had taken on his phone of Yuri playing with Tia, who was barking and squealing joyfully. He knelt down and played it for the third head. The whimpering stopped, it’s ears pointing up. Had it ever heard another dog besides its two brother heads? It stared at the phone video intently, a tiny window across time and space to a vision of bucolic harmony, a green field under a blue sky gleaming with sunlight, and two wild creatures in joyful symbiosis. He saw the expression on the third head change radically, it started to pant with its tongue out as if smiling, looking at the screen, at Ore, then back at the screen in a shocked amazement from seeing a world it never thought possible. The second head had finished eating, the first stopped the growling completely. The dog was now docile, its tail wagging.

Ore stood up and continued his journey, the dog following behind him.