dog days [Tom]

anthony ewald-laws

Nobody ever spends their time thinking of boys like Anthony.

A middle child in the massive Laws family, he felt as though he could never quite manage to carve out a niche of his own; surrounded by siblings like the confident Lola and charismatic Jack, there seemed to be so little space for him to simply exist, so little that had not already been carved out by those far more sure-footed than a timid boy such as himself.

Anthony leans against the wall of the alleyway and gives a long sigh. He was an awful person, he thinks, to feel unhappy when his loneliness was such a trivial fear in comparison to the horrors he witnesses each day in Twelve. Mr. Laws had a warm smile, and kept plenty of food on the table, and well - if it was easier for the others to delight him with their card tricks, and to laugh amongst themselves, then who was he to impose? He only had to hear the screams nearby - a woman shouting at her husband about money, a child's cry, the sound of glass shattering against a brick wall - chastising him for his jealous thoughts, warning him that only misfortune awaited for bad little boys who were not grateful for what they had.

(In his dreams, he imagines himself shuffling a deck of cards, making fancy ripples the way he remembers Mitchell showing off to them when he was a young child. He imagines his siblings crowding around the table to look, his voice answering loud and clear when they ask him to teach them, with Mr. Laws at the center beaming that wide smile of his.

But Mr. Laws was mayor now, after all, and always a very busy man. He tries to tell himself he doesn't need their attention, but he knows it's as much of a lie as telling himself that Jayne might be coming back alive.)

The sound of a whimper breaks him from his thoughts. At first he figures it to be the child from earlier; another family's affair, he thinks, something best not to interfere in. But when the whimpering comes again, he pinpoints the noise as coming from the opposite direction of the fighting family, distinctly pitiful and distinctly not human.

The mother dog is dead, he knows that much as soon as he sees it. A stake straight through her eye and into her brain, killed just like Jayne's bastard of a district partner had killed her and gotten praise and a crown heaped on his head for it. He can still recall the commentator's voice from TV - looks like the sure way for a boy from District Twelve to win the crown is to kill his district partner, am I right?

The single puppy crawling out from under its mother's corpse, pawing at her bloodied form, is also distinctly not dead. It lets out another cry, and Anthony gently reaches for it; barely the size of one of his arms, its golden hair matted with the mother dog's dried blood, it feels so warm and so vulnerable in his grasp. He strokes the puppy's fur, and thinks about how he knows what it feels like, to lose a mother so young.

"C'mon, little guy," he murmurs, the puppy blinking up at him as he scoops it into his cupped hands. It loved him. It needed him. He could see so much happiness welling up behind its sad brown eyes as its whimpering faded away. He would take it home with him, then; his siblings loved animals too, and they would show it enough kindness, for the puppy was young and innocent, and deserved nothing else. It would be his companion, someone who would wag its tail at him and make his heart melt even on the bad days, the days when he felt all he was good for was fading into the brickwork. "I'm gonna get you somewhere safe."