BOWIE

By

Eric Richer

I know it sounds stupid, but we got this dog because we couldn’t have kids. Sylvia wanted to call him Prince, in homage to the St. Exupery novel she revered. I’m sure if we had a boy she would have named him Antoine.

I never read the book, and it turns out the mutt was crazy. We got him young but who knows what those before us did to him. He was beautiful, a mix of Siberian Husky and Belgian Malinois, and had some sort of seizures, like panic attacks. In those moments he no longer recognized anyone, and only had two things on his mind: hide deep under the backseat of our car, or tear your throat if you tried to dislodge him. I owe him this cleft lip gash. I called him Bowie because of his odd eyes.

Having kids playing or running around made him nervous, so I’d tie him up whenever friends with children came by, or put him in the car like this time. I had locked the doors, let some air in through a mostly closed window, but the trunk lock was messed up.

His plumed tail was now slapping the bloody dashboard as I approached the car. The little girl was lying in the back, face down on the wet blanket. Her severed jugular had repainted the interior. I never thought she would manage to climb through the trunk to pet him.

Her mother’s screams finally drowned out the flow of blood pounding my temples, and her husband held her tight to let me pass. I caught a brief glimpse of Sylvia at the kitchen window before she walked away, hands clasped over her mouth.

I grabbed the passenger door handle and looked at Bowie through the window. His strange mismatched eyes could sometimes pierce your soul, as if wondering why he was like that, why he had done such a thing… I tried not to look at them as I beat him to death with an axe handle.

BIO:

Eric Richer was born in France in 1971. He grew up with 7 dogs, read a lot, studied cinema, worked in movie theaters as a projectionist and went to Japan. There he made a documentary (Kamo River), came back, returned in the darkness of the projection booths and started writing. His first two novels, La Rouille (The Rust, 2018) and Tiger (2021) were published by L’Ogre Editions. He is currently working hard on the next ones.