Dog with Rabies

By Kate Adams

It made me a dog with rabies. I went out in the night to the garden and my face was looking straight to the ground - to the earth. I felt the foam at my mouth and I took it and I rubbed it into the soil with my fingers, rubbing the disease and my heat into the earth that it came from. I drew the heat from the folds of my body where it congregated. I stuck my hands into my armpits and my elbows and behind my knees and drew out palms and palms of heat. I rubbed it into the earth furiously with the saliva. I felt like a child sweating on a deep summer night where the air was nothing but dandelions, and every dark ceiling was a swelling headache, a fever. I felt the feeling of sweaty dampness on cotton, of grinding blunt molars. I pummeled that patch of soil with my fingertips so hard that they started to burn and hurt at the joints. I felt the foam come back and fall from my chin to my neck to my chest. I pooled it in my disgusting hands and wiped it on the grass. It took me. I tried and I tried to give it back, to say ‘leave me! I am a skinned person! I have hair on my head and my legs, I have strong nails and I see the rocks and the bark and I touch them! leave me!’ I was crying. my hands were dirty and my fingers were broken.

I was vile. I was something earthly and rotted. I was a dog with rabies, pieces of meat floating in still water with mosquito larvae. I scratched at the worms in the patch of earth and felt their soft flesh under my nails, felt them split in half and become separate beings in my hands. I came from this these things,  I am physical substance. I was never destined to have an appearance, everything, my skin, my hair, the way my nose looks, the way my mouth tastes. It's all just one chemical reaction after another. Little beings inside my skin splitting off like worms, tunnelling through follicles and veins and membranes. I am not one person, I am all of them.

Slowly, the night ended. I was gripping roots, I was red in the face. My spine was long and my body was furless. I was not a dog with rabies, I was a person with broken fingers and mud on my face.

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