A dog's life

Oh, how I hate her!

That mouth with those thin maroon lips and that tongue swishing out, wetting the lips, like some kind of morbid attempt at seduction.

Those owlish spectacles reflecting my harrowed image in the lens – I could see my cowardice playing out like a short film on the celluloid of her lens.

And her voice, that voice! Words joined together in a mish-mash that is called language, worming and forcing its way down my throat. They come as injunctions, commands, orders, reprimands, nags. She spits bile, growls threats and ululates like a rabid bitch.

Through the years, I thought I had loved her. How mistaken I was!

As I stand there, head bowed; I could feel her voice drowning out everything in the background. I try to block myself from that weaselly voice, the pitch gradually escalating to high, by imagining myself in a kind of vacuum. No way, Jose. My plan is not working, my imagination is futile, and that voice continues to pierce through the armour of my self-created vacuum.

She is screaming something at me. I don’t know what she is saying, I can’t be bothered. How I regretted loving her!

In my peripheral vision, she is wagging a stubby finger at me. I see a tail spouting from her behind. Her sartorial accoutrements transform into a mat of thick fur. And her head with that Pomeranian-like coiffure becomes that of a Pomeranian! No, it’s a mongrel that she is transmogrifying into.

A bitch of a mongrel.

A mongrel bitch.

Interchangeable the phrases and the nouns.

I stand watching mouth agape, amazement pulling the flesh of my face. She is turning into a dog! What is this, a Twilight Zone moment, I wonder to myself, eyes horrified, mouth quivering.

And her screams have become barks. Her saliva has turned into canine spittle. She has turned into a dog.

Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis recalls itself into my head and before I know it, I have taken the fruit knife from the table top and plunged it into the bitch’s matted body.

A spurt of red washes across my vision, splattering my tear-streaked face.

And the horror of it dawns on me then.

I had stabbed my mother!

She had picked me up like an abandoned stray those years ago, and had slogged to provide me an education and a roof over my head. I had loved her like the biological mother that I never got to know and love.

And I had killed my adoptive mother.