(continued from previous page)

Your People

To keep track of your people, you have many names for them. Most of these names are sense names. They are sight and sound and smell names. Again, these cannot be truly translated, but you have some reasonable approximations, which you are happy to share.

Your People's Names

Your People

Those Who Would Bathe You

He Who Would Bathe You Quickly So as to Get It Over With

Those Who Would Feed You

Those Who Would Pet You

He Who Would Scratch Unscratchable Places

She Who Would Walk You Off the Lead

He Who Would Throw the Ball but for Whom You Will Not Drop the Ball

She Who Would Refill the Water Dish

He Who Smells of Garlic, Tastes of Salt, and Will Let You Lick His Feet

She Who Does Not Allow Licking Ever

She Who Drops Food from Her Plate

He Who Leaves the Seat Up So That You Might Drink

Sensenames

Dog names are too complex as translated into the language of your people. Though each is translated into words above, to prevent confusion, there are no real "words" associated with each name in your mind, and the concept of a name being translated into words is foreign to you. The association is sense only, and the sense is remembered in the organ that senses it: odor in your nose or touch in your skin or taste on your tongue or sight in your eyes or sound in your ears or knowledge (gnosis) way deep down in your dogness.

The Sense of Gnosis

You have a sense that you are pretty sure your people do not have, and it is the sense of gnosis, or knowledge. It is difficult to describe to those who do not experience it firsthand, but it is the most reliable of all your senses. You feel it in the most reliable of places. You feel it in the part of you that makes you You. You feel it in your dogness. You are a dog, and all dogs have this sense, and all dogs have access to this dogness. Not all dogs use this access, however; it has been worn away by time and the lack of need for it. It has been worn away by indiscriminate and unlikely misuse.

Your People

Each of your people has several individual sense names, but this is not confusing to you, because it is not a matter for your brain, as you've already mentioned, but a matter of sense memory.

He Who Leaves the Seat Up So That You Might Drink

This is your favorite name for him, though he, too, has many. When you are downstairs, alone, and headed toward the bathroom, you hope that he has been the last to use the seat. Often, he has. Each night, this is generally the last name you give him before going to bed, and this name will be on your mind when you wake. At this time he becomes He Who Lets You Outside So That You May Pee. Sometimes you have to wake him so that he will let you out so that you can pee. If this is the case, before he is He Who Lets You Outside So That You May Pee, he is first He Who Pushes You Away Saying, "Dammit, Don't Lick My Damn Face."

She Who Pretends to Be Angry When You Jump Onto the Bed to Greet Her

When you jump onto the bed to greet her, she uses the voice that is supposed to mean she is angry, or the voice that is supposed to tell you that though she's using the voice that is supposed to tell you that she's angry, the voice instead means that she does not mind that you've just jumped up onto the bed, and it will be up to someone else to call you down. You sometimes think of her as She Who Means Little but Implies Much.

When you jump onto the bed, the children follow you up, and the cat disappears, and you are all up there in the warmth and the glory, and you will stay there until it becomes clear that the children's antics are going to cause an injury soon, at which point you jump down and go to the closed bathroom door, hoping that whoever used the bathroom last left the seat up, hoping that someone will leave the door open soon. You are so thirsty.

(continued on next page)

If you’d like to read other book excerpts delivered each day in your email, visit www.DearReader.com.

 

 

 

Bookjacket

You Are a Dog

by Terry Bain

 

Buy online:
$10.73

Copyright © 2004
by Terry Bain
Published by
Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc