A Prostitute Becomes A Dog

A jeremiad of skinny dogs skulk over flyovers with their blood-haunted eyes and beaten fur bleached grey by the low wattage of car headlights. One of the dogs is a transformed prostitute. He breaks from the pack and wanders down to a kitchen in the industrial wasteland to listen to bacon roiling in thick grease and watch the shimmering of lunar light on a pane of glass. Then the factory begins to roar and, in the pre-dawn, pre-warm, heat its machines. They clang and wail and crash, sounding to the cocked and broken ear of our ex-drab and now dog like the mourning songs of whales. It is relatively easy to imagine in this area that the sky is just a ceiling; a swollen roof of ice ending at the level of the satellites and the clouds of tired smog. The dog prowls outside the kitchen. He lives on a diet of Polish meat, melted ice cream and the twisted bones of cigarette ends. When he was a boy- long before his transformation- he was weaned on milk and rum, only ever consuming food cold due to fears of a monster living in the oven. He would sit on the ulcerated shag carpet and slurp at coagulated tomato soup, safely bathed in the womblike light of the television.

Lying on the pavement in a stolen fur coat at the age of nineteen, the last few seasons fast-forwarded and made dizzy in his head, he quickly died. About a second after he began to moult, the outer layer of fur stripping away and leaving his cold photocopy of skin. The night covered him like tar and the other great light in his life, the moon, just disappeared. The money from his last john slowly swirled in his pocket, conjoining with soaked trousers and thieved boots to form a patchy, worn-out pelt that stretched tightly over fractured bones; the leather boots shifting into the leathery pads of paws, bitten and bled nails jagged into crooked, golden claws and all the metal fell from his mouth, leaving first hollow nubs and stubs of teeth until they smushed together and became canine and his tongue was punched with tiny holes. Four dogs roused him with a poking of noses and mucky tongues. He awoke but still felt sleepy and mumbled onto his feet, his head very sore. He tried to bark to greet the other dogs but couldn't. He had thought he was on a higher level, really even this was just a plateau. He starts to yelp as the light ekes through the clouds.

1. RZA- Ghost Dog Theme

2. Sonic Youth- Tremens

3. Vladislav Delay- Lumi

'Fever' by David Wojnarowicz (1981) No copyright infringement intended.