I am the dog killer. I kill your dogs. You will pay me for it. You will thank me for it. With a blubbering smile. I am tender. I speak softly and firmly and if you’re really broken up I’ll even put a tentative hand on your shoulder. I will tell you it was painless but it was not. I will tell you they died peacefully but they did not. It is not like falling asleep. That’s a cute little trick we play on you. They feel everything. They are terrified. They know that they are dying. They know that you have killed them. I hold their heads so that they are looking right at you. Right into your eyes. Killing them without a thought. Then they die. I take no blame in this process.

I pet your dog on her dry, hard snout and run a slow finger across her mucous caked eyes. I inject her with what I say is a sedative. She looks more relaxed already, you sigh. You’re relieved. I smile. This was a saline solution. There is nothing to block what is coming, no dream I could fashion to steal your gaze from what is climbing through your window, what is slithering under your locked door. The dog does shut her eyes, though.

I ride around in a clunker van full of my chemicals and my dead dogs wrapped in yellow sheets. My logo, PAWS2HEAVEN, is peeling off the side. At every stoplight the bodies tumble.

Once I killed a dog named Janie. Big, fluffy collie. The owner greeted me at the door, introduced herself as Janie, too.

You two have the same name.

Yes, we are bound together. Insofar as a name is a symbol to denote a form with some kind of unique property (you the ‘Dog Killer,’ one who kills dogs, and I, ‘Janice,’ a singular amalgam of thoughts, ideas, and dreams), we share the same name. Our fates have been sutured together at some faraway point in time. Longer than you could know.

I nodded. I understood perfectly. The carpet in the living room is haunted by the ghosts of piss piddling and dropped food, the shag mottled and caked with the forever-shadow of a life lived and wasted and spilled on the carpet. The room is smaller than most rooms. There are no windows. There is a light, dim in the corner, so that the room looks like some primitive cave in which we, two quiet sinners and a dying dog, are huddled, dreaming silently away from the dying fire, the drab wall a strange and unfeeling stone. The dog is monstrous and hurting on the floor in a stasis punctured only by labored heaves. I do not say a word.

She wasn’t always like this.

No?

No, no, but she’s been sick for a long time. Janie’s soul has exceeded her; that’s why she has to die. I see it oozing from her nostrils, condensating on her snout. I see it caking her eyes. You should hear the way she groans at night. I thought it was the pipes at first. It just has to be now. But I can’t watch it. Wouldn’t want to watch it even if I could. Just be gentle with her.

Janie lay prone and empty, body excavated like an ancient site, quiet and haunted by past celebration. Her eyes burned wide and her breaths were labored, oblivious and all-knowing, helpless and understanding. I scratched the cartilage just behind her ear and she sighed and rolled her eyes back. I hope this means she liked it. I can never know.

After I injected her with a mixture of rat poison, mercury, and rock salt, she sputtered shortly, still in stasis. Then she shut her eyes and it was over.

Janie, human, walked back into the room when I softly called her.

Is it over?

Yes.

How was it?

Her soul returned.

It did?

Yes. In full force, I might add. I was prepared to inject her with a life-quieting dose, but as I went in with the needle his eyes suddenly shot full of blood and intensity and began darting madly around the room and then straight at me, gazing, leering with a ferocious, proud, unflinching beam. He sprung up in a flash—tail wagging, tongue flung-flopping, teeth sharp and ears perking, his snout wet and hot like fresh-picked fruit on a boiled day. She ran around the room seemingly a thousand times over, nipping imaginary butterflies in the air, hunting invisible rabbits. She yawped and barked and growled and snarled and yipped and whimpered and roared. I was impressed. It seems her crisis of spirit was resolved almost instantly.

She smiled. I knew it. I can rest easier now.

I carried the bag out on my shoulders and placed it carefully in my van. Janie’s face contorted slightly but she did not ask questions. We keep every dog that we kill. Some do not like this. They ask for cremation, we give them a bag of sand. They ask for a body, we make them sign about eleven different forms and if they’re real insistent we give them a plastic bag full of frozen tomato sauce, cowhide, and human teeth. Chalk it up to decomposure. Occupational hazard. Rigor mortis.

We can’t give them the bodies, even if we wanted to. And the bodies don’t cause us much trouble anyway. To tell you the truth, which I rarely do, I’m not exactly sure when the bodies disappear. I am driving with my van weighed down and as I approach a red light I prepare for the usual tumult of crashing bodies. But when I break I break hard and fast, for there is nothing back there, just empty bags and the occasional dog spittle.

I remember Dog Heaven very well. I fell into it one night as I sat in my burning room full of empty dog bags. I was sweating hard. Dog Heaven is dark and wet and hot. Dog Heaven has soft, flesh-like walls. Dog Heaven has knee-high water that runs warm tendrils into your feet. Dog Heaven is a sphere and we all lie within it. Dog Heaven rotates at regular yet unknown intervals, sending all the dogs flying painlessly to another point in the sphere. The dogs in Dog Heaven are happy. They are all asleep, all the time. Their legs are always twitching. They make low sounds in their sleep, filling the whole of Dog Heaven, an endless reverberating echo of the low, drowsy rumble of the sleeping beasts who run fast and unthinking in their dreams. Running through that endless notch between two steep and narrow cliff sides, rocks flying at their paws. I wondered if they’d be better off if they never met me. If they never met the first man, or if they mauled him to pieces and sent us away to shit in a bush or otherwise die.

I do not believe there is a Dog Hell.

Every dog I have ever killed has died of its own free will. I had no active hand in it. There was nothing in the needles, only dust. I only listen to them. They only whisper me their sins in their low, low moans and I hush them, laughing slowly. Your confessions are sinless, you are pure, you require no absolution. You are only harboring the guilt of those far more ignorant and far more cruel than you. You are not in conference with the evils of this world. You are only a witness to my crimes. I have created new ways of doing evil, and I wish this lie could be exchanged for a truth. My last job was at an ice cream shop.