I don’t think I’ve ever been a good dog.
Good dogs protect their families without hesitation, but I always ran when He came home. I never knew how to act around Him. The bad times could happen at any time and even though He mostly ignored me no one else was that lucky.
I thought about biting him. I growled once, before I learned to never do that again. After that I hid, only coming out to follow the sounds of crying and nose at the bruises. Pathetic.
A good dog would have fixed it. A good dog wouldn’t be scared.
When we moved into the new house there was something already living there, something that good dogs chase away. A thick shadow thing that stood in the halls at night, making hungry sounds.
It watched Him.
I watched it.
We had been living there for a year before I saw it move. I followed it down to the living room where it crawled up the couch and poured itself into his sleeping mouth. He gurgled and twitched and I hid under the big chair until he stopped clawing at his throat. When he sat up, he smiled and tried to call to me.
I stayed under the big chair for three days.
It’s been inside him for a while now, constantly writhing under his skin. No one else notices. It’s hard for humans to see I think. Seeing is a dog’s gift and if I was a good dog I would tell them.
But.
No one has cried for so long. No one hides. There are no more bruises. I let it sit beside me and scratch behind my ears. It’s voice is so nice and calm.
It calls me a good dog.
the micro fiction i wrote for Alice X’s march prompt of “
super friendly but misunderstood parasites” over on patreon.its not a traditional nice parasite story but i’d written a traditional nice parasite story years ago and i didn’t want to repeat myself. plus, i don’t know if anyone else’s family holds this superstition, but i’ve been taught all my life that if a pet won’t go in a room or walk over a particular thing i should just follow its lead. so the thought of a pet willfully ignoring whatever it sees is both interesting and spooky whether the story is about shadow demons or human robbers.
