The dog

An insistent noise enters the barrier of my sleep, repetitive and all too familiar. “Not again”, I mumble, as I hear paws scratching on the bedroom door. Well, not exactly scratching; ripping into pieces would be more appropriate.

I hate this dog.

When we stay in bed for too long, it panics. My husband thinks it’s because it’s been abandoned in the past. When the dog realises it is alone, it seeks for traces of us within the house, and afterwards everything is upside down. Even now, it is about to attack the heavy, expensive wooden door of our bedroom. And as usual, my beloved is asleep. He would sleep through the scratches, the whining, the barks. He used to sleep through the babies’ cries, too.

Did you know that a baby can scream as loud as a plane taking off? Well, our babies did.

But that’s not the point of my story. We have lost the silence of our Saturday morning and the animal is prone on destruction, so I decide to get up. I put my slippers on and grab my shawl from the chair. Marc grumbles slightly. I am so tempted to let the dog in right now. It would jump on the bed on Marc’s side, as thrilled as if it had won the lottery. There’s no reason why he should sleep while I can’t, after all. It is his dog. But Marc wouldn’t even mind. He would talk to the dog (“you were afraid, weren’t you, you were afraid without me”), then I would say something, and he would ask for my indulgence. “God knows which kind of treatment he has received in the past”, or something of the kind. My husband does refer to the dog as a “he”, by the way.

Continue