text: Hi, I wrote this some months ago and have decided to share it with the world after only having shared it with a couple of friends. As a warning, this story is a descriptive account about a child that is eaten by a dog, there is no happy ending. It is designed to be disgusting and very bleak, I say this so you can turn back if this isn't the kind of thing you'd want to read. **Feral** **1** After spending the night and morning trying to sleep through the discomfort, the kid finally decided that he had reached his limit. He quietly and hopelessly rose from his dilapidated mattress, there was residual sunlight breaking through the thin curtain, illuminating the patchy, black-cornered walls of the bedroom a dark golden brown. He tip-toed through the memorized minefield of creaking panelled wood across his room to the door, along the way stepping past torn, discarded clothes and locks of hair which had been forcibly shaved from his head. Upon the door he slowly placed the side of his head, the worn paint felt cold against his ear from the damp humidity of the room. He listened closely for any indication of life beyond the door, footsteps, banging, incoherent chatter, anything. He strained to make out any sounds over his own heartbeat and the biological rumbling that conjured visuals of distant collapsing buildings in his mind. Nothing. Not certain, he never trusted himself to be certain. He carefully opened his door to the bare minimum that would allow him passage through and fought against his instincts as his slipped through the doorway. He stood at the entrance to his room, surveying the next challenge and trying to pre-calculate his movements. His breath became heavy with the anticipation of what he was about to undertake. He cautiously avoided the random and strewn paraphernalia that littered the corridor, deftly aware of where his next step would be in order to avoid accidentally brushing his leg against a plastic bag or catapulting a discarded spoon with his heel. He had long since become apathetic to the squalor around him, taking for granted and unconsciously accepting it as normal, that it was just their way of life. He used the wall, which was sticky with a mixture of thrown beer, residue from cigarette smoke and filth, to maintain his balance as he proceeded discreetly down the hallway. It seemed like every abstract splattered beer stain had its own story to tell. Result of and witness to the countless arguments which have resounded throughout the walls. He pleaded to invisible nothings not to be found, his brain recycling the same word over and over again. “Please.” His senses were on high alert and a small dose of adrenaline was flowing through him. He was trying to keep his breathing steady but his body persistently demanded more oxygen than his lungs had the capacity for. Panic set over him like fog as he obsessively replayed the scenario of being caught. It enveloped and subdued his confidence and inspired terror in him which ordered his entire body to turn around and hide back in his room. However, realizing how far he had gone already he decided that it would be best to just continue. He took his final step and he felt swept away by relief, allowing himself to relax from the intense concentration required of him from the last several minutes. He stood at the opened bathroom door and stepped onto the cracked tile flooring, its pristine white having long since faded, he no longer had to fear triggering a fate-sealing sound. Limping inside, he silently closed over the door behind him, resting it on the broken latch which prevented the door from closing at all. The pungent smell of stale piss and shit which would likely make a person unaccustomed to the smell gag had become tolerable to him. He stood at the stained toilet, taking extreme care to avoid causing himself pain as his slid his pyjama bottoms and underwear down toward his knees. Wincing as he bent down, he bit his lip in anticipation and tensed completely to deal with the pain as he sat himself onto the yellowed, porcelain rim of the toilet and let out a choked yet controlled sigh. He figured it was best to take the pain as quickly as possible rather than drag it out so he tensed his abdomen and pushed, whimpering through the stinging sensation. The loud splashing rekindled the now smouldering cinders of terror, he was immediately furious with himself for having overlooked that the splashing would make noise. It sounded as he had expected it to but was wishing to himself that it hadn’t. He registered it as much more fluid sounding than normal, like filling a glass to the rim. He looked between his legs to find a small pool of cloudy red water and the rest of the bowl speckled with his blood. He stared blankly at the mouldy wall as he processed through the shards of memories of the night before. His mind was a blurred collage of disjointed recollections of being breathless, of the large hand that gripped the back of his neck and forced his head into the mattress, of the warmth of the flesh that slammed rhythmically against his ass. While cycling through these thoughts he absent-mindedly rubbed the sensitive, red-blotched depressions in the palms of his hands that his fingernails had left when he had clenched his fists in reaction to the pain. He eventually exhausted himself and his mind drifted off. He felt the familiar feeling of claustrophobia surfacing inside him, crossed his arms over his knees and buried his head in his lap. **2.** It had been seen roaming the neighbourhood on rare occasions yet everyone who bore witness to it decided the easiest thing to do would be to let it pass through rather than interfere with it. The dog was large and dishevelled looking, with patchy fur and thin features. On this day it decided to search the neglected, overgrown garden of dead bushes and knee-high weeds of this house for anything edible and found the front door to be carelessly left open. It confidently entered the home, keeping its snout close to the floor, trying to sniff out anything of interest. It investigated almost every discarded possession in the hallway, rummaging through black trash bags which had been left for so long that there was a visible border on the floor which recorded where it had sat. The kid heard the garbage in the hallway being disturbed, focusing on the clang of beer cans as they were pushed against one another as the dog foraged. He froze completely still and could feel the pores of his skin adjusting in anticipation for the impending cold sweat. The dog decided to skulk further along the hallway and skip over the room where the kid’s father currently lay with muted breathing, lost and spinning somewhere between realities, his eyelids flickered the whites of his eyes like a defective television screen. Milky drool trailed from his gaped mouth which displayed his rotten teeth, across his gaunt, pale cheek to the tragus of his ear where the collection of saliva awaited departure. He was slumped halfway between the dirty couch and the carpet that was pock-marked with cigarette burns, his back resting on the seat while legs barely supported him from sliding to the floor. On the decayed coffee table which had been retrieved from a dump some years previous lay the father’s worn metal lockbox, open, with its contents removed and now partially consumed. After spending half a minute sitting in paralysed, agonising dread, the kid’s eyes desperately trained on the knob of the door, analysing it for any movement whatsoever. His mind was remarkably blank; his mental state was an echoing rejection of the situation, mixed with disbelief and the feeling of inevitability. The door budged tentatively with a push from the dog’s snout and its long head was revealed to the kid who was suddenly in a state of misunderstood confusion. The dog attentively twisted its head in the direction of the kid as he sat there with his short legs hovering over the floor. It perked its ears up, its black eyes met with his brown set just for a moment before it broke the stare as it swiftly moved into the bathroom, shoving the door wide open with its body. The dog spread its legs, lowered its fierce head and while baring its teeth and furrowing its brow released a guttural growl at the kid who was now in a state of defensive shock. As he was thoughtlessly raising his left arm as part of his natural reflexes the dog lunged toward him, grabbing and puncturing his forearm, the kid only felt extreme pressure in his arm at first before screaming out as the immense pain registered in his brain. The dog, sliding slightly from lack of grip, used its body weight to tug the kid from the toilet, he felt a stiff ache in his upper thighs as they quickly shifted position. Still with his underwear around his legs, he slumped awkwardly down onto his stomach on the tiled floor. The dog still grasped tightly onto his arm and violently shook its head, growling in exertion as it tried to separate the meat from his bones. The kid lay there helplessly with blood slightly splattered on his face, letting out tired, high-pitched childish screams and fully expecting his father to enter the room in response but his cries echoed unheard throughout the small bungalow. He attempted to use his free arm to push the dog’s head away, irrationally expecting that it would successfully stop the attack, but he was too exhausted from the previous night to put up any sort of useful defence. He watched through the film of tears as the dog tried to pull his arm from his body, peeling the skin away to reveal raw, soft pink meat. He passively noticed when the dog hinged its jaws open to get a better grip, that its teeth were stained red.