Old Weird America

This is a piece from a zine by Rose White. It is excellent. I was always fascinated by Detroit. We'd drive through it on our way, to and from Ann Arbor, and a few times we went to bizarre underground parties there. What a city! With it's giant ruined abandoned mansions and creepy crack houses... it has quite a feel.

You can get her zine here.


Dead Dog on Avenue

by Rose White

Last night was spent dealing with a dead dog. At dusk, a happy dog with its tongue hanging out emerged from a sidestreet and began trotting blissfully down Michigan Avenue. I knew what would happen next, and couldn’t not watch: a car, making no real attempt to avoid the dg, hit it and drove off.

They drive off when they hit humans, too: I remember picking Randy up at the hospital with his blood-soaked clothes in a plastic bag, and picking Drew up at the hospital with his hair caked to one side with blood, a row of fresh staples in his head.

So the dog: I had to fix it. I put my finger on its neck where I thought its pulse should be, and, finding that inconclusive, carefully touched a boot tip to its furry stomach.

Then I noticed that its neck was twisted around in a strange way, and a perfectly shaped pool of blood was forming on the concrete behind its head. No, definitely dead.

A lady drove up and got out.

“Did you do this?”

No!

“Got a shovel?”

”No.”

“Well, I got some boxes.”

We use them as tools to push the dog out of the road, but the dog is heavy and limp, so now it’s harder than we thought; we leverage ourselves by kneeling down to push, oblivious to the cars now swerving around us, and then, of course, blood starts smearing everywhere and gets on me; I realize that I can’t get blood on jeans that aren’t mine; this requires even more delicacy.

Finally, the dog is out of the road, asleep next to the curb, and she arranges its paws so that they aren’t so grotesquely pointed in the wrong directions.

“You know,” she says, “I just wanted to, you know, get it out of the.. you know, I couldn’t.. got a cigarette?”

”No.”

“I just wanted to.. you know what I mean?”

”Thanks.”

excerpted from Old Weird America #1