damaged goods (short fiction)

I seem to remember now. The Creator was traversing the green Earth, tagging His work, turning every once and awhile to see this faithful creature following shyly at His heels, peering up from time to time inquisitive with head tilted and ears bolted at the ready, and He stops and laments, the poem went something like this, if I remember...

I've left you to the end.
I've turned My own name
back to front
and called you dog,
My friend.

A few Winters ago, on one of the bitterest and frozen mustache nights, I got a call from my beloved elderly Aunt Doris out at her isolated bungalow, scared 'til she almost stopped breathing, about a scratching sound coming from the bedroom side of the cottage where the drifts swept the highest. What scared her most she would tell me later, was when she tried to peer out into the night holding the blazing lantern high and close to the frosted window and only being able to see her own reflection.
"It's just the wind...perhaps a limb against.."
"No...there's...the crying."

I left home with tires spinning and lacking my heavy coat. Out in the country where she lived the roads had not been touched after the latest storm, and gripping the steering wheel I was slightly awed at the dim virgin tracks I was leaving in my rear view mirror. Calming at the familiar belt of Orion in the clear purple sky guiding me, I imagined I was an invincible hunter too.

The cottage was ablaze, fully lit with every lamp my terrified Aunt could light, and with the thin layer of ice sealing the white snow nearest the cottage shining so beautifully, it look like a small boat cast afloat in a vast ocean. I jumped out of my jeep and onto the frozen snow, crunching around to the North side past two uninterested cast iron fawns. Up against the siding, below where my Aunt was fingernail tapping the window, and in the faint blue beam of my key chain light was a little white dog on its side, a retracted hind leg caked in crimson. I anchored my feet into the snow and crouched like a catcher preparing to receive a one hundred and seven mile per hour fastball from a lanky tobacco-spitting farm hand.
"It's a dog!"
"God?"
"Dog! Dog!"
The light went out at the window, and there was no Moon, but I could see from my key chain light that he was showing his teeth. And I could see faint pawing marks on the wood siding from sill to ground. I rose and backed away a moment, then stooped again.
"Hey boy," I said affectionately, not making eye contact.
"Yessss," I said slowly and lovingly, my voice shivering.
I knocked on the window but I could see it was clamped shut by unyielding ice. Retracing my steps and veering off to the front door, I was met by my Aunt in her ghostly bone clicking white nightgown and pink frazzled slippers, silver hair straight down her back, carrying a pink flannel blanket and an unsteady flashlight. She gasped at first sight of her injured visitor, then recovered nicely and softly sang to slow our hearts and frozen breaths, something about Jesus and The Sweetest Perfume, aiming the white light as I once again crouched and tucked in the trembler, now breathing unevenly but never once taking its eyes off me all the way to the threshold of the sheltering fireplace. There was no singing now. I put my arms around my weeping Aunt, her snow sparkled silver hair tucked under my chin.

****

In the summertime that followed I was in town one day picking up a supply or two for Aunt Doris at the Whole Goods Market when I heard someone behind me over at the window snicker, 'maybe with that he should be shopping at the damaged goods market'. But I didn't care. After heaving everything into the back of the jeep, and with my limping companion peering up at me with a 'do I want candy?' look, I untied the leash from the tilting parking meter and we both made a bee line to the deli across the street.