The Killing by Ciaran Cooper

I hear my name from somewhere far away, then nothing, so I drift back into sleep and everything is soft and quiet again. But it’s the barking that finally wakes me. Our dog, Crusoe.

“Harrison, get up!” Dad’s voice.

Then the barking again, more intense this time.

“Harrison!”

Coming down the stairs, I hear a sound from Crusoe I’ve never heard before, like a wild animal caught in a trap, half mean, half scared.

The front hall light is on. All the lights are on. The house is lit like daytime. My parents are in the living room. Mom is in her dressing gown. Dad’s wearing a T-shirt and work pants but no shoes. He’s holding Crusoe by the collar. Crusoe is scratching at the floor, trying to break free with that sound coming out of him. There’s more barking outside. Other dogs.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

“Wild dogs,” my mother says.

I’d heard about packs of dogs that run through the valley every few years, but I’ve never seen them. I figured it was just an old story.

“They roam in packs,” my father told me when I was young. “Feral dogs and strays they pick up along the way. They’re like wolves but more dangerous. They know the farms and they’re not afraid of humans. They’ll tear a man to pieces.”

“Harrison, come hold the dog,” Dad says. “If he gets out, they’ll kill him.”

I kneel down and hold Crusoe tight, arms around his neck, feet around his hind legs, all my weight on him.

“Thomas, they’re on the porch!” my mother says. I hear the fear in her voice.

There’s a scratching of nails across the wooden planks, a pounding like horses running, then a rumbling growl that gets Crusoe howling. We hear them bump into the railings and walls as they round the corner and circle to the back of the house.

Dad flips on the porch lights.

“The light might scare them off,” he says.

“How many are there?” I ask.

He looks out the window.

“Dozens.”

We hear them snap at each other as they funnel toward the back steps. I imagine them leaping into the dark air like a wave of violence. There’s a few seconds of quiet before we hear them in the barnyard.

“We need more light,” Dad says.

But the switch for the vapor lights hangs from a pole in the yard. I can tell he’s thinking about going for it. He takes his shotgun from the closet, loads it, and pumps it. Crusoe snaps at my hand but doesn’t bite. He wants to follow my father.

“Don’t go out there, Thomas,” Mom says.

“If they get into the barn, the horses have no way out,” he says.

“Just don’t,” Mom says.

There’s a sudden thump against the back door. Then another. Then scratching. One of them is trying to claw its way in, digging through the wood.

Crusoe goes nuts. Dad kicks the door to scare off whatever’s out there but the scratching doesn’t stop. Crusoe is dragging me across the floor.

Dad kicks again, yells, “Ha!” and starts pounding the door with his hand. Now Crusoe is unstoppable.

“I can’t hold him!” I say.

Mom runs to the kitchen and comes back with some rope, loops it through Crusoe’s collar and ties him to the leg of the couch. Dad kicks the door again and the wild dog finally runs off. There’s a smashing sound in the yard now, then high-pitched squeals.

“They’re in the rabbit pen,” Dad says from the window.

The sound we hear next is like fabric ripping, then a crashing noise.

“They’re in the chicken coop,” Dad says.

I look out the back door and see a group of dogs coming back toward the house, six, seven, eight of them, and more coming. I see them clearly in the porchlight. Some look like farm dogs you’d see on any normal day and some don’t look like dogs at all.

A loud howl makes them stop and turn. They run around the side of the barn and disappear.

We hear the howl again from across the fields.

Then nothing.

Just silence.

Dad unlocks the door.

“Thomas, be careful,” Mom says.

“It’s okay. I just want a quick look.”

Dad points the shotgun out in front of him.

Crusoe is quiet now but still pulling against the rope. He’s dragged the couch halfway into the hall. Dad tiptoes onto the stairs and fires the shotgun into the air. He fires again, then stands for a second listening.

When he comes back inside, Mom deadbolts the door.

“Are they gone?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s over.”

Crusoe is pulling at his rope again. He begins to howl.

Mom says, “I’ll put him in the basement.”

“Good idea,” Dad says.

She leads Crusoe through the kitchen and down the basement stairs. She locks him behind a door in one of the canning rooms. I hear her slide an old dresser in front of the door. Then she comes back up and puts the rope away in a drawer.

“I’m going back to bed,” she says. “It won’t be pretty out there in the morning. We’ll need our sleep.”

“I’ll be up in a little while,” Dad says.

Mom looks at us both but doesn’t say anything.

When she’s gone, my father opens the back door and we step out onto the porch. We stand there for a long time not speaking. We watch the killing move like a storm across the valley—the flash of barnyard lights, gunshots like thunder—while somewhere deep in the house our own dog is trying to dig his way out.

Artist’s Statement

My writing tends to center on identity crises within fractured family structures, the misplaced or marginalized, and mental illness. My work migrates from humor to tragedy, often mingling these two elements as I seek to explore the full depths of the human experience. Having grown up in a family with two mentally handicapped brothers, I often find myself returning to stories about brothers at the moment of discovery of their strengths and limitations in relation to the broader world outside their family structures. I’m perennially fascinated with the stripping away of youthful innocence for deeper insights.

“The Killing” is part of a novel-in-stories called, One Time, a series of linked first-person narratives all told from the same protagonist moving through life from age eight to thirty-eight.  Thematically, these stories deal with alienation, loss, and sorrow, More specifically, they grapple with the difficulties of growing up with a mentally handicapped brother and how the tragic loss of that brother affects the narrator and his family throughout their lives, forever informing the decisions they make and the actions they take, as well as how they "see" and interact with each other.

 Ciaran Cooper’s fiction has appeared in Salamander, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Pangyrus, The Midwest Prairie Review, and other literary journals. Cooper has received several awards for his writing, including First Place for The UW Madison Writers Institute Prizes for both fiction and poetry, The Fiction Southeast Editor’s Prize, and Third Place for the River City National Fiction Award. He has received fellowship grants from Salem Art Works in New York and the Illinois Arts Council. Cooper holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son. For more information, visit his website.