Someday, I'll find myself, finally, in the uniform of Hell—exhausted, my body coated in a yellowing, clotted thickness of sweat, the skin of my hands pustuled and sloughing from rowing—and I will know exactly why I am there.

            My eyes won’t roll back and my knees aren’t going to knock or buckle under the weight of my indignance as if this is some kind of mistake! and after I pass out I’ll have to be brought back to consciousness but it won’t be by waving one of those little ammonia chalk-looking things under what’s left of my putrefying nose. It’ll be by shoving a snapping turtle down my throat or something.

            My mind won’t fast-forward through all the self-centered, cruel things I’ve done, how I hissed at my little brother I would kill him in the night and then held a vigil outside his room, scraping a fork down his door once I felt confident he was just about to fall asleep.

            My life won’t flash before my eyes or replay holding a woman’s hope in my hands and really wringing it, not even bothering to taste the diamond liquid that comes out, letting it spill onto dirty asphalt and run down the street, like it’s hose water I washed my pickup with.

            So many sick things. Objectively repulsive, befouled, stinking things. My torture-ticket won’t be printed with the date and time of any single act I committed.

            I won’t beg to be forgiven.

            I won’t run.

            I’m not going to pretend it isn’t fair.

            My dad brought Oliver home the way some men bring home a firstborn male baby. My dad raved to the checkout woman at the grocery store, practically sang to the plumber and mechanic.

            “He’s gonna be a big boy! His paws! He’s got great big paws, and great big ears,” and then he laughed like a rooster would and demurred, “he’s gonna be a big boy, ha ha, he’ll grow into them, he’ll grow into them.” He looked off into the distance, as if he were deciding to fantasize about whether the dog would grow up to play college baseball or college football. 

            We called him “Ollie,” of course. My dad sometimes baby-talked his name into “Oliber,” and my little brother and I sometimes called him “Oli-baby.”

            For a while, every time I passed the great big beautiful boy Oliver on my way into our house after school, he’d pick up his head, wag his tail, and ask me to play with him. Then he realized he was asking too much of me, and he understood that and started asking if I’d take him for a short walk. Soon, he asked if I would at least let him inside when it rained, when it snowed, when it was so, so hot.

            And I just didn’t. No one did.

            The sheepdog, matted and sucked by ticks, oh, he was such a gentle boy, and he was such an understanding boy. I just didn’t have time; I was shrieking back at my father who also didn’t have time because he was screaming at me, or else me and my sisters were wailing at the paramedics again she isn’t waking up why isn’t she waking up?!

            Mom’s mouth is all frothy again.

            Sometimes I wondered who he was howling to. Did other dogs in other yards hear him? Did the sound break their hearts so completely they couldn’t speak? Is that why no one ever howled back?

            Sometimes I wondered, when the dirt ring marking the limits of his freedom turned to spirals, winding his tether around the thick, rough-barked oak tree until he was strangled right up beside it, was he trying to kill himself?

            But Oliver, he was a good boy, and he understood. He knew that those who slept in the house needed someone who loved them even when they weren’t getting it right.

            He accepted that we saw his water bowl overturned and did nothing for a few more hours. He resigned himself to folding those great big paws, as if in prayer, and in the winter, he let the snow fall over his body into a sheepdog-shaped, shivering mound.

            He resigned himself to his position as a warning for outsiders. If this is how we treated those we said we loved, well,

            We didn’t hit the dog; we aren’t monsters. It’s more like he was a sponge for invisible things, and we were all sopping-filthy.

            If a dog can make a choice like that, can decide to absorb suffering like that, he must be pretty smart, huh? That dog must’ve known what he was doing.

            He resigned himself, so shall I.

            I always imagine it’s an incredibly wet heat in Hell. I have this recurring nightmare: I see myself standing, balancing on the edge of a thinly rimmed volcano; the molten disk before me is huge and blinding and other than this disk, it’s all abyss, so I can only make out the shape, but I can see, far away, silhouetted, someone else.

            I’m waiting for whatever it is I deserve, and I’m fascinated, squinting, trying to make out what this other person is experiencing. They keep doing a weird sort of jerking backward motion, flinging their arms around.

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