Member-only story
The Wild Dogs of Romania
Life is brief and the moment is all they have.
Each step she took up the steep street stuck her paw to the ground with tar and exhaustion. Her head bowed toward the gravel, pushed down by years of roaming the city. This Romanian summer seemed crueler than any she recalled, but then each passing year made everything crueler. The blacktop scorched the pads remaining on her paws, and her panting failed to stave off summer’s sweltering chokehold. Waves boiled up from below her belly, roasting her pendulous teats, the remnants of her many past litters.
So much life passed through her body. Her litters were healthy, often with two or three sturdy pups living past the milk. She was strong and that bore out in her bloodline, but now she knew she would have no more pups. Time mercifully took away that gift.
The street crept up a hill peppered with houses and empty lots full of wooden debris and mounds of trash. Some houses along the street were newly built with bricks and steel and some were rickety wooden shacks with colorful shutters, waiting to topple. To her, all the houses were the same. They were all human, smelling of human life.
She had a human once — a tiny, old woman who called her Lolica. That was long ago, and the only time in her life she didn’t put most of her hours into prowling. The old…
