Praying

2006

There’s a road I drive on when I’m on my way downtown that passes through a bleak, desert-like place which I've always loved the looks of. Traffic there is sparse, if existent, and the road goes on for maybe a good, straight kilometre before it shits you out back into the city. It's a great stretch of road for driving while listening to grim, twangy music of the old dead west.
This wasteland has always intrigued me, and I always kept it in my mind to go and look through it. Walk around; get a real feel for why this desert area, with its old, dead trees and abandoned spirit houses has become what it is. I wanted to skulk around and see the place. So today I drove out there with that purpose. After a mostly uneventful trip there, I parked my scooter on the edge of this dusty scape and began walking inward, toward whatever was there.
I found that there was, as to be expected in this land, a scattering of litter all about the area, as well as larger piles of refuse, their places marked by fledgling shrubs gripping outward from the ground, as if something beneath the land was being suffocated by the trash and was attempting to claw its way out. The aforementioned spirit house was seated diagonally on the clumped dirt, all the praying dolls splayed about its radius. Praying, knocked onto their sides into the fetal position.
Further along, there was a large, crumbling concrete foundation of a building either once there or to be there, lined with bent and twisted rebar spines. A great rubble altar flanked by divine offerings of modern life's waste.
A few green, scummed-over ponds pocked the area, around which bushes and flowers tried to grow. Large patches of ground were covered with a mesh of flowered vines. Morning Glories, by my estimate, which may indeed be wrong. In one bed-sized span of charred dirt, a dying fire, perhaps lit the previous night, softly crackled to itself. A breedless dog loped near, but having no territory to defend, did not display aggression.
I was being driven out by the day's heat and the cloudless noon sun, so I made my way back to my scooter. The dog followed in a friendly cautiousness, and I took note of a strong, ripe scent I had caught brief wind of in my entering this newly explored slab of world. Though it was an unpleasant odour, I felt that I should find its source. It was an awful smell, but not outstandingly chemical nor fecal. Under an overreaching arch of brittle bushtwig were two legs, spread wide open, exposing a coarse-haired, deflated belly and sticking out between, a dog's tail. Between stomach and tail was an awful black hole which looked almost as if something had exploded out from that region, leaving a cavernous, sticky, fist-sized cavity of stench volumes more revolting than the canine asshole and genitals that it had replaced.
As one panned up this centerfold of decomposition, one noted that above the hips and first, lowest pair of darkly shriveled, cracked nipples was nothing discernably dog. Instead the viewer is met with a large hole, much like the first one, only larger, as though this cur had been cut in half, either pre-or-posthumously. Only out of this hole stabbed a spine and slightly disheveled ribcage, all covered in many greasy, maggot-busy mouthfulls-worth of pungent, glistening black jam.
Upward, dog began again, briefly. The two front legs had yet to be dined upon, and contained not the gasses necessary for such a repulsive, detritivore-aided explosion as occurred on the body. The head, however, was hidden. There was a bag made of a material seeming to be a plastic adaptation of burlap covering it. I leant over to pick the bag up and pour out the contents, but as my fingers touched the end farthest from the dog, they felt a warm squish tell them to leave the bag alone.
My fingers thanked the squish for its advice and I walked back to my scooter. While halfway to my bike, the smell revisited me. I turned and to my right I saw another carcass, this one not so liquified as the previous one. A dog again, of the same sandy brown colour, with its face frozen in a peacefully joyful grimace, lying on its side, in the fetal position, front paws together.
Praying.