Charla's Shadow by Robin Smith

Charla Savelle was sitting at her work table midway through a Wednesday morning when her life changed. She didn't know it yet. She continued to work, her hands rising and falling as steady as a matched pair of metronomes as they went about their appointed tasks with an efficiency that was almost a separation of self. The left worked the sponge that kept the motor cool and the blades wet, while the right hand had the unenviable task of directing the machinery itself. She conducted their pace with her own measured breath, pulling air in deep, slow drags through the thick cotton mask and exhaling with a little cough to shake the dust free.

The back room where she made her living was brightly lit, but what she saw came through a diffused haze of grit on goggles; she did not need her eyes for her work anyway. She didn't need her ears either the grinder was loud and shrill as a mutant wasp in a murderous rage she wore earplugs to soften external sounds, and ran her mind through a mental tapedeck of classical piano to cover up any audial residue. All she needed was her hands, and her hands were happy, her hands whistled while they worked. Her hands knew their job and Charla was a woman at peace with the world.

It was time for a Diet Coke break.

Charla switched off the grinder and stretched expansively, savoring the pull of muscle and rush of blood for as long as possible, then hopped off her high chair and uncorked her ears. She started to remove the stone for close examination before turning, and then realized she could still hear a faint grinding sound.

She put the pebble in her hands down carefully in the jade bowl provided for half worked materials and turned around, holding her breath.

The door to the hallway was closed, but she could still hear something. A rasping, almost. Something abrasive anyway, but not consistent; the sound came and went irregularly, never very loud.

Charla pulled her mask down and pushed her goggles up, looking hugely around the work room as though baring her face could somehow help her locate and identify the source of the sound. It didn't, of course, and neither did her work table transform itself into a bank of security monitors, although she gave it a hopeful glance. She wanted to entertain the notion of mice in the walls, but the sound, although soft, was too heavy and the way that it came and went left Charla with the impression of an intelligence impossible to imagine coming from rodents.

There it was again a slow drag, faintly coarse but muffled, this time with the creak of floorboards. Was it in the house? She couldn't tell.

Charla stood motionless, feeling her heart hammering at her ribs, actually clutching a little at her throat just like a bad actress in a B movie. After a minute or an hour of frozen listening, she picked up a chunk of heavy lapis rough to use as a weapon and edged toward the door.

Her slippered feet made no sound as she moved out into the hallway, raising her rock to the level of her shoulder as her eyes jumped frantically from shadow to shadow in search of the sound. Her house was so dark in the mornings...she'd never noticed before....

But the house seemed empty, and when the faint shifting came again, she turned into it and found herself looking down the hall at the front door. The sheer curtains that covered the long windows that flanked it fluttered in the warm breeze spun out by the heat register, but she could see through them pretty well and she saw only her own empty porch, and five miles of wooded nothing beyond. Had she imagined it? She couldn't have!

Scrrrape. A soft thud. A low moan.

The highway was out there somewhere, unseen past the fields and the forest. Could some accident have happened, some injured person crawling all this way only to collapse on Charla's doorstep? It didn't seem likely, but the only alternative Charla could think of was a ghost, and that was hardly a more plausible explanation. She edged a little closer to the door, acutely conscious for the first time of how isolated she was out here, how starkly alone.

She paused at the door, gripping her rock tightly, and pressed her ear against the smooth, cold wood. She couldn't hear anything now but her own heartbeat. She looked at the curtains she could lean six inches to one side and look out, see for sure but she didn't move. She didn't want to reveal herself to anyone on the other side. If she did this, she wanted to have the element of surprise.

Thud.

Charla's hand clenched on the doorknob and she took one last breath to steel herself against confrontation. Then she wrenched the door open, raising her rock and sucking in a scream even though it didn't seem to be required.

She looked down, and almost screamed anyway.

There was something dark, something HUGE, spread out virtually all over her porch, and it had a head, and that head lifted and looked up at her. She could see only one eye beneath the bush of black fur that covered it, and its gaze was thoughtful and calmly inquiring. Then it stood up, and Charla's crude choice of weapon dropped from her frozen hand. The creature's head came right to the level of her breasts. Each wide front paw seemed easily the size of her own feet, with at least an inch of additional length in the form of claws. She thought it was a bear. Even after the long, plumed tail raised and wagged, she thought it was a bear.

They looked at each other for what seemed an eternity as Charla tried to grapple with the reality of this animal. Eventually, it decided to continue introductions in the comfort of a heated home; it nudged her gently aside and went on in.

Charla spun, staring, and watched the beast pad heavily across the foyer and into the parlor. It moved utterly without uncertainty, as if it had lived here for years.

It hadn't growled at her, she realized, and thought that must be a good sign. Its eyes had been bright and clear, its wide jaws free of foam. That was about the limit of her knowledge of animal ailments, however. So it didn't look rabid, so what? It could still eat her up and hardly even have to chew.

But it was cold, and the creature wasn't coming back out of the parlor. Charla closed the front door and went after it.

It was lying on the couch the whole couch and it didn't look up when she entered, although it did wag its tail once. It looked exhausted. It also looked filthy, all matted and mud streaked fur, with hanging drops of baked hard mud dangling from its underbelly, tail, and all four armpits.

It was a dog, she realized. It had to be a dog. A big dog, but just a dog.

"Um...come here, boy," Charla said timidly.

The dog thumped its tail twice and did not move.

She inched toward the couch, holding out one hand and trying very hard not to think of it as "snack size" when measured against the dog's massive wedge of a head. "Come on, boy," she said again, louder this time.

The dog shut its eyes and feigned sleep.

She reached him, still holding her hand outstretched, but the dog did not raise its head or look at her. After a second or two, she eased her fingers right up to its nose.

It grumbled, pushed out a huge expanse of black and pink tongue, and slimed her whole hand.

Charla jumped back with a cry of child like disgust, wiping herself exuberantly dry on her shirt front, an act that served only to cover her drool slick hand with rock dust.

The dog didn't move. A few more seconds went by. Charla snuck a little closer, reached out, and tentatively patted the top of its head.

Its fur was gritty to the touch, but underneath the debris of dirt and pine needles it had an undercoat as soft and thick as down. She had to work to get her fingers through it, and once she had, she thought the skin felt hot. She wondered if it were sick after all.

At last, it occurred to her that the dog hadn't hatched out of an egg on her front porch. Someone was missing him maybe even walking around in her sprawling backyard, just as lost and dirty as the dog.

Charla left the animal sleeping on her couch and got her coat from the closet. She stepped into her boots and went outside. The dog's trail was obvious, its massive tracks as stark in the stale snow as cigarette burns in linen. Charla started walking.

Evidently, the dog had circled around from the back of the house before ascending to the porch, and it had done a lot of zig zagging from tree to shrub to fencepost on its way from the stables and tack sheds, unused now for at least four years, but still smelling of manure and hay. It seemed to her from the impression of the tracks that the dog had spent a little time in the stable, perhaps sleeping in the close corner on the low stack of ancient, unraveled burlap before it thought itself rested enough to move on. The tracks that walked up to the stables were considerably less steady than those that went to the house.

Charla followed the trail of slushy pawprints, her legs quickly tiring as she slogged through the crust of heavy snow and the tangled mat of dead and frozen grass beneath. She never paid much attention to the fields, but she hadn't realized how overgrown they'd become, to still catch at her legs like this in the dead of winter. Likewise, the blackberry bushes at the back borders had overrun the fence itself to an appalling degree. When spring rolled around, she had to get someone out here to take care of it.

The dog had evidently struggled through the thorns, but Charla had to find an easier crossing, and then come back, her eyes sweeping over the ground until she found the dog's tracks again. The forest was sparse here, mostly maples and oak, but the snow was much thinner and the going was easier. She walked comfortably, breathing into her cupped hands to keep them warm, in what seemed to her to be an arrow straight line through the trees, stopping when she came to the banks of Murder Creek.

The creek (ridiculous to call it that, considering the size of it) was just as pretty as a postcard as it cut through the forest. Its beauty and frozen stillness was somehow enhanced by the water that poured down the center white foam spitting and gurgling to itself as it passed the shards of thinning ice that reached from each bank. The water seemed to move with deceptive slowness and grace, but when Charla scraped her boot across the snow, she uncovered the true creek, with ribbons of rapids unspooling silently just below the thin veneer of treacherous ice.

Charla shaded her eyes against the blinding glint of sun on ice, and easily picked out the muddy patches that marked the dog's trek over the water. If she squinted, she could even see dark dots she believed were the dog's pawprints on the far bank. It had come over the ice as far as it could, swam the twenty feet or so in the middle where the current kept the creek from freezing, and the current must have been harsh, because its tracks came up almost fifty feet down from where they'd gone in. No wonder the dog was so tired.

In all this time, the only sounds had been the crunch of her own boots. No one had come across the water but the dog, and no one was on the far side calling him back. Charla stood for a few minutes beside the mostly frozen water, and then headed back to the house.

The dog was still on her couch, now on its side with its head shoved almost completely beneath the cushion. It wagged its tail when she walked by, but only twice, and the effort seemed to exhaust it further. Its side heaved with shaky breaths, and finally the dog began to relax again, sinking into the cushions as though rooting itself and gradually sprawling until it had comfortably overhung both armrests.

It looked so tired. She knew she'd really ought to be doing something about it, but she hated to disturb it. Still...maybe she should get in touch with the appropriate authorities now and just tell them not to come for a few hours.

Of course, this led to the question of just who the appropriate authorities were. Charla got the phone book from the kitchen and sat there, staring at it as she tried to think of who to call. Under Animal Shelters, she found the nearest branch of the Humane Society, in Salem, and dialed. They were closed, but invited her to call back the next day during proper business hours. There was a shelter in the opposite direction, about forty miles over and south, advertising itself as no kill and open seven days a week, so she dialed.

A harried but pleasant sounding female voice came on, and Charla began to explain about the animal that had invited itself into her morning so unexpectedly.

"Are you saying you want to surrender your dog?" the woman interrupted.

"It isn't my dog. It just walked in."

"So it's a stray?"

"Or it's lost. It looks lost. It's too relaxed not to have an owner," Charla added, thinking of the easy way the dog had sprawled itself on her couch.

"Well, I'll take a description in case the owners show up, but you should know that the dog was probably abandoned deliberately. What does he look like?"

Charla peered back into the parlor. She could just see the top of one ear and the long plume of its tail. "It's mostly black, I think, but it's hard to tell because it's so dirty. It's got, uh, white on one of its paws and it's sort of brown or rusty on its neck. It's got brown eyes. One of them is brown, anyway. I can't see the other one."

"Do you know what breed it is?" the woman asked.

"No. I don't really know dogs."

"Well, how big is it?"

"Big," Charla said immediately. "Very big. At least six feet long, because it's bigger than the couch and that's what it's lying on."

A long silence followed that. "All right," the woman said at last. "Okay. Well, we'll give you a call if someone asks for him."

Charla backed up until she was sitting at the table again, staring in disbelief at the wall since the woman wasn't here to face her. "Aren't you going to come and get him?"

"Ma'am, there simply aren't any kennels available right now, and I'm sorry, but even if there were, we just don't accept animals of the sort you're describing. Strays are too unpredictable to adopt out, and any large breed requires more maintenance than we can afford to give him."

"But what am I supposed to do with him?" Charla asked, feeling a little helpless and adrift. She could see the corner of the couch from here, and at the sound of her distress, the dog finally raised its head and looked sharply around, as though concerned.

"You can surrender him to the Humane Society in Salem, although I don't think they're open today." There was a short pause, and then a sigh. "And to be honest, you should know that their policies are very much like ours. They'll take the dog...but they'll probably euthanize it within three days if it hasn't been claimed."

Another silence, this one on Charla's end.

"Oh," she said finally.

"You have to understand," the woman continued, not unkindly. "The budget we have is laughable. We depend on donations for our basic supplies, and volunteers for maintenance of the kennels and record keeping. Even then, we operate at a loss much of the time. Adoption fees only cover a fraction of each animal's medical needs. We just don't have the resources for an animal that size. No one does."

"Well...what am I supposed to do?"

"I can call the shelters and let them know you've got the dog, so if anyone asks for him here...." The woman let that trail off to show the unliklihood of that scenario. "And you can place an ad in the paper, perhaps hang some fliers in the area where you found the dog. You can call the police and ask for Animal Control to come and get the dog, but they'll just take him to the shelter."

Charla glanced out the window at miles of nothing and snow, wondering vaguely where to hang a flier. "Okay."

The woman sighed again, but "Good luck," was all she said before hanging up.

The dog was still looking at her, and still with that eerily human expression of concern.

"It's okay," she told it. "You can stay here for a few days...until your owner comes."

The dog didn't seem to be relieved by her assurance, but it finally lowered its head. Charla supposed she ought to feed it.

She got up from the table and started looking through her cupboards for something dog friendly. She was a little lost on the subject of canine nutrition, but deduced that it couldn't be all that different from her own, except maybe with less emphasis on fruits and veggies. Using that as kind of a guideline, Charla made the dog a tuna fish sandwich, and then a fried egg sandwich in case the dog didn't like tuna. She had some honey mustard and some creamy horseradish for the egg, and relish and grated cheese for the tuna, and hummed a little as she arranged them on a plate. She took this, along with a bowl of water, into the parlor.

"Hey, dog," she said.

Thump, thump, went the tail.

Charla set the two dishes on the coffee table, backed up, and hunkered down to watch and see if it ate anything.

After a few moments, the dog raised its head to sniff the offering. It whined, dropped back onto the cushion, and continued to ignore her.

Several more minutes crawled by. The clock in the hallway tolled the hour, and Charla realized a rather large chunk of her morning was now irretrievably gone. Might as well go back to work.

She picked up the lapis rough from the front foyer and returned to her work room. The rock went on the shelf and Charla sat back down and stared at the table. Everything was still where she left it, just as though a dog had never walked into her house and lain down on her sofa. After a while, she lowered her goggles, raised her mask, and turned on the grinder.

At a quarter to five, Charla raised her head, arched her aching back, and decided she was done for the day. She stripped on the way to the bathroom, had a good soak in a hot bath, and padded naked down the hall to the kitchen for a snack. She saw the tuna can and eggshells on the counter and only then remembered the dog.

Absurdly, the first thing she did was to jog back to the bedroom for a robe.

The dog was still on the couch. It had drunk the water, stripped its tuna sandwich of filling and eaten the egg and the slice of bread with the mustard on it, but otherwise had not moved.

"C'mere, dog," she said.

It raised its head over the arm of the sofa, gave her request some thought, and got up.

The dog was even bigger than she remembered, and its leisurely stretch as it slid off the couch only emphasized its mass. The mud balls had dried; they clacked together as the dog came towards her, wagging its tail and looking tired. Charla was afraid to look at the couch too closely. She'd paid almost two thousand dollars for it.

She moved into the foyer to open the front door and the dog stopped right there and gave her a hard, suspicious look.

Charla stepped out onto the porch in a show of good faith and spread her empty hands to show her good intentions. The dog followed, clearly not convinced.

Only after Charla got all the way down onto the snowy lawn did the dog condescend to move out to the bushes. It nosed around for several long minutes, checking often to make sure Charla was still well away from the house, and finally slipped around the hedgerow. She heard its heavy snuffling and grumbling, then silence, then a sharp whine and another, and finally a yipe right before it came trotting back. The dog shot up the stairs and into the house, head and tail down and eyes averted as though embarrassed.

Charla looked after him, frowning, and then went to see if she could find what had hurt it. She expected to find a broken bottle or thorns, a sharp rock, maybe. She saw a few drops of blood in the snow, but nothing that could have caused it.

When she went back into the house, the dog was again on the couch, and with every breath it took, it whined a little. Charla moved the coffee table out of the way and knelt beside the sofa, taking careful hold of each of the dog's paws in turn, hunting for the boo boo she was sure it had. She found a scab on its leg and a long cut on its neck, but both seemed to be healing and neither was openly bleeding. And there was no blood on the carpet, she saw. No blood in any of its pawprints on the porch....

Charla lifted its back leg, exposing its underside, and frowned. The dog's belly was almost bare of fur and swollen taut red and shiny as with sweat, although dry to her careful touch. She put the barest amount of pressure beneath her fingers and the dog flinched and yelped, tugging its leg out of her grip and looking at her reproachfully. She stroked its head, thinking, and finally stood up and went back to the phone book in the kitchen.

She looked up Veterinarians.

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