Log One

I awaken. I don't know it at the moment, but this day marks my fourth straight year of existing in the dogscape. I push myself up from the carpet of writhing, twitching dogflesh beneath me and rise to my feet, stretching in the morning sun. It took me a while to learn to balance on the layer of solid dogs that now blankets every inch of solid ground, but nowadays I can walk and run as easily and as fast as I ever did on soil or concrete. Perhaps faster.

This was a city once, I think, though which one I can't remember. I only owe my guess to the massive pillars of dogs jutting into the sky, perhaps ancient buildings now completely filled and overgrown by canine biomaterial. I climbed one once, sinking my fingers and toes deep into the dogwall to gain purchase, and after hours and hours of climbing was rewarded with an incredible vista - fur and eyes, panting tongues and wagging tails, hugging the contours of the once-barren land and stretching in a single amoebic mass farther than the eye can see.

Now I don't do that, though. Now I merely go about my day. I hike to the Gardens, where the dogplants sprout up in bizarre shapes from the floor of the dogscape, and reach up to pluck the fetal puppyfruits right off the wagging, energetic branches. I bite into the succulent flesh, the juices dribbling down my chin and dripping down to be reabsorbed by the groundflesh, and revel in the savory taste. I’m thirsty, so I range until I find one of the Mothermounds, and there I suckle at a teatpatch until I’ve had my fill of milk. Sometimes I see other humans around me, as well-adapted to the dogscape as I am, but I barely acknowledge them, say nothing. What, after all, is there to say? The world is different now - what meaning would our old words have?

Free-ranging dogs are becoming rarer and rarer to see now, and those I do see seem as lost, as passive as I am. They too graze on the dogplants, step carefully over the undulating, bleeding dogfloor, and dimly acknowledge myself and one another. In the distant sky, and on the far horizon, I sometimes see massive forms sail or crawl or undulate, and I wonder if in this new world normal, singular, ambulatory dogs have become as obsolete as I am.