Like every other short story I've ever started, the finished product of RIKTER did not end up as I'd intended. It began as a comedic idea, and I didn't expect that it would provoke an emotional, sentimental reaction from me when I read it afterwards. Originally, it was inspired by the question: "How would you respond if your dog spoke to you in your own language, while the two of you were alone ?" I've owned two dogs in my life, but only briefly have I lived alone with a dog. I wanted to explore a realistic reaction that a dog owner would have if the dog tried to communicate verbally, and what the animal's motivation might be. This was a very quick story - just about eleven pages. The first five are pasted below...
RIKTER SPOKE ONLY ONCE
By Rod R. Surratt
The lawyers justify it like this: Qui tacet consentire videtur. He who is silent is understood to agree. And so you roll over that silent partner with every decision, convincing yourself they’re comfortable with you holding the reins. I had one conversation with Rikter, my runt chihuahua, before he left me this past October.
Four years ago, Jeremy and I found Rik at an indoor dog shelter in Yorba Linda, holding our noses against the stink of soggy doggy food and waste as we walked between rows of cages, glancing over our shoulders to ensure no one saw us making this haughty gesture. It would’ve appeared ironic if anyone saw: a two-tone-hair-dyed, skinny-jeans couple with piercings and neck tattoos who just couldn’t stand the stink. Rikter stared up between the bars, his pig-like face trembling with those constant Chihuahua-jitters. Brown eyes bulging like a halibut. He shook like that for a week until we thought he might explode all over us, but eventually the application of warm baths and warm hands won him over.
Eating posed a problem from the start. Animal Services had found Rikter rail-thin in Toluca Lake, playing the street life in the Red Light District with his patchy coat, his gnarled ears. We couldn’t afford canned food, and he couldn’t chew his Kibbles or his Bits, even softened with milk. He’d nab one pellet, work it up and down on one side of his jaw like a ventriloquist’s dummy, then drop it on the carpet. Vexed, we brought him to the vet for a soup-to-nuts physical. She said she’d brush his teeth, give him an oral exam. The next morning her assistant handed us a vial of little brown teeth.
“What in hell’d you do to him?!” Jeremy scowled, never a man to mince words.
“Couldn’t save these,” this pixie-haired, gum-snapping assistant told us. “All rotten. Fell out when we started brushing ‘em. Happens a lot with strays. How long did you have him before you brought him in?”
I ignored the loaded question. “How many does he have left?” “Three good premolars on the left, two slightly loose on the right. But his mouth is clean now and his breath is fresh!”
I shot her back my most constipated expression. “Thank god for that.”
Back home, I moved Rikter to canned food over Jeremy’s financial objections. But within a year the premolars on the right fell out and Jeremy called him Hangman because his face looked like someone executed by a drop from the Jeremy admitted it; he saw Rik as an accessory to the condo. But I adored Rikter from the start - treasured his every movement the way mothers gush over newborn babies. This distinction would eventually lead to our break up.
In the worst months of fighting with my now-ex, when Rik and I sat atop my battered longboard at San Onofre beach and watched the three-footers fold at low-tide, I found myself absently scrawling R+C within either loop of the infinity symbol into wet sand with my keys, and wondered if I had latched on to him too tight. Amidst the chaos at home, I headed to New York for a week to work my booth at Inked magazine’s Tat Expo.
In my absence, Jeremy entered Rikter in an Ugliest Dog contest and won a grand at second place. He didn’t tell me. I found out through Twitter and we had a scuffle over it - a “kiss with a fist” as he used to put it, but livelier than usual. The kind that ended with scratch marks, pounding neighbors and cracked picture frames.
A guy like Jeremy will accept something he hates about you for years without speaking up, nodding with a pouched lip - slide it on, slide it on. And when you finally back him into a corner and poke him with a stick because you can’t muster one more sheepish “could you please,” he explodes: spitting venom, smashing bottles, and hurling insults he can’t take back.
“Who does that!? What kind of person humiliates a little helpless dog for extra cash!?” “Rikter doesn’t know what humiliation means, Carly! And neither do you, given your track record of what you’re willing to do to get people to like you!”
Every moment after became stilted. We passed each other in the hall like gunslingers, muttering invectives, sleeping as far apart as possible. The breaking point arrived three weeks ago, after five years of passive aggressive sarcasm. “Kiss with a fist” ended with a knee in Jeremy’s crotch, his fist through the wall, and his exit.
That brings us up to speed. To last Thursday. When it happened, I’d just rounded the corner to the bedroom with a paintbrush and the upside-down lid to a can of white primer I used as a palette. Rik lounged in his blanket atop the imitation-leather sofa in the living room, watching HBO’s rehash of an old Boardwalk Empire episode, but the music from my computer speakers drowned out the dialog.
Nine days had passed since Jeremy picked up the last of his junk, and I’d truly begun to relish the freedom of “just me and Rik.” No Jeremy to bitch about me taking Rik with me everywhere or gripe that a dog with legs smaller than buffalo wings doesn’t need three walks a day. I felt content that Tuesday evening in my underwear. Happy enough to be singing, gyrating even, as I approached Jeremy’s puddied-up fist-hole with my brush.
“I’m Rik’s private dancer! His dancer for money! Do what he wants me to do!”
“What is that supposed to mean exactly?!”
I stopped painting mid-stroke. The voice didn’t sound angry, just competitive, trying to be heard over Spotify. I looked at my hands and considered how useless the paintbrush would be facing off against an intruder.
“Hello?” Because that’s what you say when you hear a mysterious voice in your condo at sunset. Let him know where you are. I peeked around the corner and saw only Rik, pointed ears up and waiting.
“I said what does that mean.”
My fingertips tingled, my toes clenched into fists on the carpet. No mistaking this time. The slightest twitch in the lips. The voice carried a masculine resonance, like a narrator from Our Town.
“Rik?”
“Carly?”
Something cold and thick spilled over my wrist.
“You’re spilling primer on the carpet.”
I followed his eyes to a white stain framed against the worn fabric, in the shape of a humanoid vulture – a Skeksis from Dark Crystal. Clicking off both Bluetooth speakers with my phone left only the hum of the dishwasher. “You can talk.”
“Yes. What does that mean? That you’re my private dancer?” “It’s... a Tina Turner song. I deconstructed it to make it about you.” Stupid as it sounds, I feared him, and stared at the cracked open screen door. Something wicked this way comes. Catholic superstitions surfacing. Gods taking the form of bushes, birds, wolves. The bedridden seeing visions of the saints. Demon possession. “Are you inside my dog?”
Rik cocked his head. “Is that an existential question? I am your dog.”
“How did you learn to talk?”
“Same way as you, I suppose.”
“I don’t think so. How are you doing that?”
“You remember how you learned how to talk?”
“Not really.”
“Me neither.”
I glanced again at the door, this time to check for anyone watching. “So…do you want something that I forgot? That’s what this is about?”
Rik stretched his jaws like a python, one of those dog-yawns that end with a low ringing sound. “I want to be younger.”
---
(*If you'd like to read the rest of this story, just CONTACT me and I'll send you a PDF.)
By Rod R. Surratt
The lawyers justify it like this: Qui tacet consentire videtur. He who is silent is understood to agree. And so you roll over that silent partner with every decision, convincing yourself they’re comfortable with you holding the reins. I had one conversation with Rikter, my runt chihuahua, before he left me this past October.
Four years ago, Jeremy and I found Rik at an indoor dog shelter in Yorba Linda, holding our noses against the stink of soggy doggy food and waste as we walked between rows of cages, glancing over our shoulders to ensure no one saw us making this haughty gesture. It would’ve appeared ironic if anyone saw: a two-tone-hair-dyed, skinny-jeans couple with piercings and neck tattoos who just couldn’t stand the stink. Rikter stared up between the bars, his pig-like face trembling with those constant Chihuahua-jitters. Brown eyes bulging like a halibut. He shook like that for a week until we thought he might explode all over us, but eventually the application of warm baths and warm hands won him over.
Eating posed a problem from the start. Animal Services had found Rikter rail-thin in Toluca Lake, playing the street life in the Red Light District with his patchy coat, his gnarled ears. We couldn’t afford canned food, and he couldn’t chew his Kibbles or his Bits, even softened with milk. He’d nab one pellet, work it up and down on one side of his jaw like a ventriloquist’s dummy, then drop it on the carpet. Vexed, we brought him to the vet for a soup-to-nuts physical. She said she’d brush his teeth, give him an oral exam. The next morning her assistant handed us a vial of little brown teeth.
“What in hell’d you do to him?!” Jeremy scowled, never a man to mince words.
“Couldn’t save these,” this pixie-haired, gum-snapping assistant told us. “All rotten. Fell out when we started brushing ‘em. Happens a lot with strays. How long did you have him before you brought him in?”
I ignored the loaded question. “How many does he have left?” “Three good premolars on the left, two slightly loose on the right. But his mouth is clean now and his breath is fresh!”
I shot her back my most constipated expression. “Thank god for that.”
Back home, I moved Rikter to canned food over Jeremy’s financial objections. But within a year the premolars on the right fell out and Jeremy called him Hangman because his face looked like someone executed by a drop from the Jeremy admitted it; he saw Rik as an accessory to the condo. But I adored Rikter from the start - treasured his every movement the way mothers gush over newborn babies. This distinction would eventually lead to our break up.
In the worst months of fighting with my now-ex, when Rik and I sat atop my battered longboard at San Onofre beach and watched the three-footers fold at low-tide, I found myself absently scrawling R+C within either loop of the infinity symbol into wet sand with my keys, and wondered if I had latched on to him too tight. Amidst the chaos at home, I headed to New York for a week to work my booth at Inked magazine’s Tat Expo.
In my absence, Jeremy entered Rikter in an Ugliest Dog contest and won a grand at second place. He didn’t tell me. I found out through Twitter and we had a scuffle over it - a “kiss with a fist” as he used to put it, but livelier than usual. The kind that ended with scratch marks, pounding neighbors and cracked picture frames.
A guy like Jeremy will accept something he hates about you for years without speaking up, nodding with a pouched lip - slide it on, slide it on. And when you finally back him into a corner and poke him with a stick because you can’t muster one more sheepish “could you please,” he explodes: spitting venom, smashing bottles, and hurling insults he can’t take back.
“Who does that!? What kind of person humiliates a little helpless dog for extra cash!?” “Rikter doesn’t know what humiliation means, Carly! And neither do you, given your track record of what you’re willing to do to get people to like you!”
Every moment after became stilted. We passed each other in the hall like gunslingers, muttering invectives, sleeping as far apart as possible. The breaking point arrived three weeks ago, after five years of passive aggressive sarcasm. “Kiss with a fist” ended with a knee in Jeremy’s crotch, his fist through the wall, and his exit.
That brings us up to speed. To last Thursday. When it happened, I’d just rounded the corner to the bedroom with a paintbrush and the upside-down lid to a can of white primer I used as a palette. Rik lounged in his blanket atop the imitation-leather sofa in the living room, watching HBO’s rehash of an old Boardwalk Empire episode, but the music from my computer speakers drowned out the dialog.
Nine days had passed since Jeremy picked up the last of his junk, and I’d truly begun to relish the freedom of “just me and Rik.” No Jeremy to bitch about me taking Rik with me everywhere or gripe that a dog with legs smaller than buffalo wings doesn’t need three walks a day. I felt content that Tuesday evening in my underwear. Happy enough to be singing, gyrating even, as I approached Jeremy’s puddied-up fist-hole with my brush.
“I’m Rik’s private dancer! His dancer for money! Do what he wants me to do!”
“What is that supposed to mean exactly?!”
I stopped painting mid-stroke. The voice didn’t sound angry, just competitive, trying to be heard over Spotify. I looked at my hands and considered how useless the paintbrush would be facing off against an intruder.
“Hello?” Because that’s what you say when you hear a mysterious voice in your condo at sunset. Let him know where you are. I peeked around the corner and saw only Rik, pointed ears up and waiting.
“I said what does that mean.”
My fingertips tingled, my toes clenched into fists on the carpet. No mistaking this time. The slightest twitch in the lips. The voice carried a masculine resonance, like a narrator from Our Town.
“Rik?”
“Carly?”
Something cold and thick spilled over my wrist.
“You’re spilling primer on the carpet.”
I followed his eyes to a white stain framed against the worn fabric, in the shape of a humanoid vulture – a Skeksis from Dark Crystal. Clicking off both Bluetooth speakers with my phone left only the hum of the dishwasher. “You can talk.”
“Yes. What does that mean? That you’re my private dancer?” “It’s... a Tina Turner song. I deconstructed it to make it about you.” Stupid as it sounds, I feared him, and stared at the cracked open screen door. Something wicked this way comes. Catholic superstitions surfacing. Gods taking the form of bushes, birds, wolves. The bedridden seeing visions of the saints. Demon possession. “Are you inside my dog?”
Rik cocked his head. “Is that an existential question? I am your dog.”
“How did you learn to talk?”
“Same way as you, I suppose.”
“I don’t think so. How are you doing that?”
“You remember how you learned how to talk?”
“Not really.”
“Me neither.”
I glanced again at the door, this time to check for anyone watching. “So…do you want something that I forgot? That’s what this is about?”
Rik stretched his jaws like a python, one of those dog-yawns that end with a low ringing sound. “I want to be younger.”
---
(*If you'd like to read the rest of this story, just CONTACT me and I'll send you a PDF.)