An acquaintance of mine got a baby and decided he needed to get rid of his dog. He said the dog was too rowdy, and he was worried it would hurt the baby. Fine, I said, I’ll take the dog. I’d recently bought my first house and had the space for it.
The dog was great at first. It was playful and rolled around, seemed affectionate. I liked the dog, and gave it a good name. But then the dog showed me his handgun. The guy hadn’t told me about the gun. I tried to make him take the dog back.
“No way am I taking that dog back.”
“You didn’t tell me the dog had a gun.”
“You didn’t ask. I didn’t tell you the dog didn’t have a gun either. You should have asked that.”
I tried to appeal to his wife but she didn’t care. She had a baby to look after now and what did she care if some idiot she barely knew had a dog with a gun? Everything was someone else’s problem.
I tried taking the dog to a shelter, too, but they were smarter than me and asked if the dog had a gun and I didn’t want to lie, and they refused to take him. Without me the dog would have been homeless. So now I was stuck with a dog with a gun forever.
The first thing the dog shot was a duck. The duck died. I felt bad for the duck and its family. I wondered if it had a family. Do ducks have families? I scolded the dog, showed it the poor duck’s limp body. I explained about the duck’s family. The dog pointed the gun at me, and I admit it scared me, so I dropped the subject and tossed the dead duck into the weeds. I stopped taking him for walks to the lake after that.
The next thing that happened was that the dog started stalking my neighbor’s dog. They had a serious beef with each other. I didn’t have a great relationship with that particular neighbor anyway, so when my dog opened fire on the other dog through the fence in the backyard, I didn’t waste any time and built a much sturdier fence so the dogs couldn’t see or even smell one another. It was so high that I couldn’t see anything beyond my own yard.
There were also endless problems with the windows at the front of the house. The dog shot at postal clerks, delivery people, Girl Scouts, and the guy who came to read the electric meter. The dog kept breaking my windows shooting at things and the neighbors were getting pissed. Curtains weren’t enough to stop him so I had to paint over most of the windows so he couldn’t see any people or other dogs. I lived in darkness. My house became the house in the neighborhood nobody wanted to visit. Baseballs and Frisbees began to accumulate in the front and back yards.
The dog made dating difficult, as well, because inevitably women wanted to see how I lived. Or rather, to see how they might be able to live if the relationship went far enough. At first I would just delay it. I’d tell them the house was a mess, or I’d tell them a friend was staying over for a few weeks. But eventually I had to admit the truth: I have a dog. He’s a very bad dog. And the woman I was dating would always say that she loved dogs and was happy to be patient and careful with the dog. But then I’d explain that it wasn’t just a normal bad dog, it was a bad dog with a handgun, and he threatened people with it. And she would think about what that meant for a moment, and then she’d start asking stupid questions.
“Can’t you just take the gun away? While it’s sleeping?”
“Have you ever tried sneaking up on a dog while it’s sleeping and taking something away from it?”
All the women I dated thought they could outsmart the dog and I’d explain why their ideas wouldn’t work and then we would fight and they’d throw up their hands and give up, or they’d ask how I ever intended to start a family if I had a dog with a gun and I would tell them I didn’t know. One woman even suggested I kill the dog. I stood up and told her that I didn’t want to be with anyone who would ask me to kill my dog for them. They all insisted on coming to my house, on seeing my bedroom. It was never a question about how they lived, only a question of how I lived. They were judging me and I felt smothered.
So, for the most part I lived alone in the house with the dog and he took his gun from his bed out to the yard and back to his bed. Out to the yard and back to his bed.
The dog and I grew older. He started growing grey hairs on his face and I started growing grey hairs in my beard. He was slowing down, eating less. He also started sleeping more. His hearing wasn’t what it once was, and one night while he was asleep I got up the courage to sneak up, very very slowly, and I snatched the gun away from him. He woke up startled and looked at me with his ears perked up. He seemed genuinely surprised.
I pointed the gun right at him.
“Haha! I’ve got you now, you son of a bitch!”
He turned his head away and looked at me from the sides of his eyes. And I held the gun in front of me and aimed it right at his stupid brain. I felt so smug and triumphant. I’d finally defeated this thing while it was weakened. But then he looked so sad. He looked off into the distance, just an old dog without a gun, pondering his coming nonexistence, and how my life would continue without him, probably happier. I thought he might cry. He put his head down on his bed, still regarding me. I lowered the gun.
I laid the gun next to him and he picked it up in his mouth and put it back on his dog bed and looked at me once more. I looked at him, too. He could have shot me right then.
“We’re getting old, dog.”
He went back to sleep and so did I.
Then one day I got out of bed and went over to pet him good morning and he was dead. I don’t think he suffered and probably just passed away in his sleep. He’d lived a long and healthy life in the blacked-out house. But he didn’t have the gun there with him when he died and I couldn’t find it. I looked all over for it. I thought surely he’d buried it in the backyard, and I rented a metal detector from the hardware store and checked everywhere. No gun. He must have found some really good spot in the house where I’d never think to look. For a time I wondered if I’d only imagined the gun. What if I’d been going insane all these years?
Meanwhile the bureaucracy of the dog’s life still surrounded me, and a few weeks after he died I began to recognize the discomfort of this lifestyle I’d lived with him. There was the heavy fence, the blacked-out windows, baseballs and Frisbees and for some reason a javelin scattered around the yard. I remembered having friends and lovers once. Now I had no wife, no children, not even a girlfriend. I’d thrown my own life onto a dog with a gun, building a fortress around him. Or maybe it was a prison, to protect the world from him.
But in all that time he never shot me. And he could have. Except for that one day with the duck, he never threatened me with the gun. We had an understanding and my home was always peaceful.
Piece by piece I removed the detritus of his life, of our life. I pulled down the fence, scraped the paint off the windows, put all the crap abandoned in my yard in a box and left it on the sidewalk. I was finally able to bring a girlfriend back to my house and it was refreshing to have a new presence in there. She didn’t bring any guns. She just wanted to open all the windows and let the air rush through. I felt free. Eventually we got married and started a family and now the house is full of noise. I never told her about the dog or the gun.
So last week my three-year-old was scooting around in the kitchen and found it stuffed behind the oven. Now the baby has a gun and she’s been threatening us and threatening the ducks. I’m used to this, of course. In fact I laughed about it. And I felt proud of the baby for finding it and waving it around at us. She's asserting herself in the world and gaining confidence, but my wife thinks it’s a big problem and we’ve been fighting. I considered leaving the baby in a basket on that old acquaintance’s porch and running off. I haven’t talked to him in years.
My wife said no, though.
2025