The Dog

Oksana saw it again out of the corner of her eye, and her finger began to ache.

It was late and dark. A light rain had fallen earlier and had left a wetness that colored the street black in the dim streetlight. The street was unnaturally deserted.

She was alone.

More alone than in all of the lonely time since she had left the rodina, the land of her birth.

She looked at the scar on her finger. The doctor had been able to reattach it, but it had been done badly. Not only had it been left crooked, but it gave her pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. She always contrived to hold something in that hand so that people couldn't see her disfigurement. It hadn't been so bad back in the rodina. The people were not as shallow there. The people there knew what it meant to suffer.

American's did not know pain. They did not know what it meant to suffer. They were like the children of a rich man for the most part. Spoiled.

The black image caught the corner of her eye again. She turned her head, and it was gone. It had been closer that time. Its eyes were like burning coals set in the blackness of it head. It had just given a glimpse of itself, and then vanished.

Her heart pounded. She felt it strongly in the veins in her neck.

She looked back and forth down the street for the sign of a human. There was none to be seen nor any light in any house.

She walked more quickly down the street toward the highway. There would be someplace open there where she could go in and hide. Hide and wait until the light of day came. She prayed a prayer to Mary, The Mother of God, and thought of the day that she had left her own mother's apartment. They had sat a while before she left. She remembered seeing the icon of the Blessed Virgin that her mother had placed by her picture. Then she had left.

That has been so long ago. Her finger ached again. She had left even the dim light and could no longer see her finger's crookedness in the darkness, but it was sharp in her mind's eye. The pain was as keen as the day that the dog had bitten it almost off.

The dog. A chill ran down her spine.

She had been with a friend at his father's dacha. Her parents had a dacha too, of course, but it was not so fine as the one that belonged to Valery's father. It was beautiful—like Valery. She had gone there to be with him rather than be with her parents.

The people in the village did not like Valery's family because they had built their dacha away from the village like they were too good for everyone else. Oksana had known that that was not right, but the people still treated her with the disdain that she merited by her connection to Valery's family.

Valery's family was rich enough not to care what the villagers thought, but it still bothered Oksana. She wanted the villagers to like her. She wanted everyone to like her.

Especially the babushka in the village who seemed to be everyone's favorite. Oksana had thought that she would befriend the old lady by giving her dog scraps of meat that had been left over from the table, and then maybe the rest would like her.

Her attempt at kindness had ended with the dog biting her finger almost off. There had been a lot of blood, but the babushka had stopped the bleeding with a bandage as she muttered some words. Valery's father had raced over 75 kilometers of horrible Russian roads to get medical care for her.

When Valery came to see her in the hospital, he had been very sweet to her. Flowers, candy. He had said, "When you are well, you will have to come back to spend the rest of the summer at the dacha. I insist."

"I don't know, " she had said. "That dog. He might have developed a taste for me."

"You will not have to worry about the dog," he said. "This I promise."

By his tone, she knew that the dog was dead.

She had never returned to the village. Her father died that summer, and she returned to console her mother.

Truly, though, her mother spent more time consoling her. She should have been there with them instead of at Valery's dacha.

"Nonsense, my dear child, nonsense," her mother had said. "You are young, and that is the time for love."

She wept now even thinking about it.

She heard a growl in her left ear. She turned and saw the dog's bright white teeth shining in the darkness, and then it vanished as if it had never been there. Closer still. Closer each time.

The highway. She must make it to the highway. It was only a few more blocks.

Her ribs ached, and her breath was harder to come by, but the sounds coming from the highway gave her hope.

She had come to America in hope. The hope was that she could make enough money to bring her mother over. Her father had died in his fifties, but she wanted to cling to her mother as long as she could. The medicinal treatment in the West was good, and she thought that maybe she could hang on to her mother a few more years.

Only after she was in America alone did she realize the irony of giving up time with her mother so that she could have time with her mother, but she did not yet know enough to realize how American that was.

She was at the highway. The lights of a truck stop in the distance half a kilometer away.

There was a bark in her left ear. She turned. There was silence.

The night was brightened now by the flashes of police lights. Traffic was being let go by as the curious looked on.

The truck driver who leaned on the police car was badly shaken up. "I never even saw her. Never saw her until I was up on top of her already, and then..."

"...and then it was too late, " the policeman finished his sentence for him.

"Yeah, that is just it. It happen so fast, " he said as one of the truckers from up at the truck stop gave him a cup of coffee. "What in the hell was she doing out so late?"

"I don't know," the policeman said. "All I know is that she was a foreigner. A Russian, I think. This looks like a passport I found in her purse. Quite a looker from the picture. About thirty, I think."

"Shit, all that way, just to die," the trucker said.

The policeman was about to say something, when he heard one of the folks milling around say, "Git, git you damned dog."

He turned in time to see a dog with its head buried in the girl's remains and a booted foot kicking a dog.

He looked to see where the dog was headed, but it was gone into the darkness.

He walked over to the remains, shook his head, and then the ambulance arrived.