Dead Things: An Introduction of Sorts

Nathan remembers when his puppy died. It was hit by a car. He found it, with its innards pouring out over the asphalt. Its eyes were unfocused. Its breath was ragged.

Its name was Ludwig.

He was seven.

And as he kneeled by it he thought, I can see how its insides work.

And with his bare hands, he had pulled apart the tears in the flesh, and Ludwig had whimpered. But he kept going, poking organs as the tiny heart pumped blood over his hands. Then slowly the whimpering stopped, and so did the heart.

He carried Ludwig up to his tree house, where he kept a Swiss army knife his dad had given him but his mother wasn’t supposed to know about. And he took Ludwig apart then, the way he had taken apart the TV remote. He laid its organs across the tree house in a line, wondering what they all did. This must be the heart, and this must be the stomach, he remembered thinking. But he had known nothing about anatomy then.

Then he had turned to the bones. He carefully cut the skin and fur away to stare in awe at how perfectly Ludwig’s skeleton must have fit together before it had been smashed by the car. And how perfectly all the inside bits must have worked together, to make one perfect little terrier.

He wished be had spent longer watching Ludwig as it had died, to see such perfection in work.

He watched the body bits rot slowly over the next few weeks. The flies were annoying, but he liked running his hands over the decaying flesh, pondering how it had all once been wrapped up as a warm little puppy.