PodCastle

* Author : Alex Jennings
* Narrator : Laurice White
* Host : Eden Royce
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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PodCastle 574: Mister Dog is a PodCastle original.


Drug use; abuse to animals


Rated R, for sex, drugs, and haunted souls.
Mister Dog
By Alex Jennings
Trenice felt the car more than she saw it. Or she saw it without seeing it. She couldn’t be sure. Had the car’s driver meant her harm? Probably not. Here in New Orleans, sloppy driving was usually accidental.
Trenice had worked late again at Chez Lazare, and while the weather was still hot, the days faded earlier and earlier. By the time she made it to Armstrong Park, sunset had come and gone. She had seen the Jackson-Esplanade bus ready to turn onto North Rampart when the streetcar sailed across Esplanade. Streetcars were slower than buses, so if she wanted to catch the 91, she couldn’t wait until she reached Canal. Instead, she’d have to take the Armstrong Park stop and dash across North Rampart, waving her tattooed arms above her head to make sure the driver saw her.
Trenice tried not to think about how badly she needed a new car, how much hassle it would save her every day, as she cut across the street. The car that nearly hit her whooshed by so quickly she barely registered it. All she got was a scent of patchouli and tobacco that cast her back ten years.
Still, she didn’t miss a beat. She clopped across the asphalt in her business hooves, waving her right arm without thinking about it. The bus sighed to a halt and knelt for her to climb on.
“Girl, you gone get hurt if you don’t get some sense,” the driver said.

By the time Trenice fit her key into her apartment’s front door lock, she was sure she’d seen Trill gaping at her from the driver’s window of the car that had nearly hit her, but that couldn’t be, because Trill was dead.
If he were a ghost, would he be angry with her? Even at the best of times, his mood swings had been unpredictable. His highs had been so high Trenice had felt buoyed along with them, but his lows had been bitter, bleak, and hard to take.
She slept fitfully that night, tossing and turning on her secondhand mattress. Her bedroom’s window unit air conditioner was on the blink again. She’d have to scrape some money together to get a new one or have this one repaired. Even at the end of September, the city heat was stifling. It lay on her like the weighted blanket she used in the winter, but its pressure didn’t soothe her.
When she slid too close to wakefulness, her mind presented a slideshow of memories. She and Trill sitting on a Red Square bench, kissing hard in the chilly night air. She and Trill making eyes at each other across a Seminar Building classroom. She and Trill sitting, stony-silent, in a darkened movie theater, refusing even to look each other’s way. Trill’s stupid car he so dearly loved, the dog he had viciously abused. Trill and Lemur smoking meth off a makeshift tinfoil screen. Trill. Trill. Trill. Trill. Trill.
At seven, she turned off her alarm before it could ring. She felt like the worst version of herself. She checked her reflection in the mirror before heading out to work. Dark skin, hair like Frederick Douglass, lips too thin for a black girl. She picked out her hair and called it done. She sucked her teeth as she glanced at her skinny-fat arms. She was too old and too tough to feel this way.