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Renee Branum
The Poop Eaters

I assembled supplies (Milk Bones for Tommy, peanut butter filled pretzels for both of us). I looked at maps. I studied routes. I read about dognapping cases on the internet, though in every single instance, it seemed the dogs were taken out of Greed or Vengeance—celebrity dogs held for ransom, or a pet mascot for a sports team kidnapped by their rivals as a malicious prank. Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lady Gaga had all been victims of attempted extorsion after a dog heist. In 1934, Harvard students kidnapped Yale’s mascot, a bulldog named Handsome Dan II. The dog’s kidnappers then took pictures of Handsome Dan contentedly licking peanut butter off the crotch of a statue of John Harvard and sent the photos to their Yale competitors. All this wearied me. I wanted to find someone, some kindred soul, who had taken a dog purely out of a gut-wrenching, overpowering Love for the dog. Newspapers, it seemed, did not write about such things.

By stealing Tommy, I could not remake the world, I knew. I could not erase any of the needs that were in us, any of the hungers—my desire for a life lit through with some brighter ache than the one that drove us to simply exist, or Tommy’s deep-rooted ancestral memories of nipping, elated, at the heels of sheep. I could not outrun all that had already burned itself into me—the sublime trepidation of the bucket lid being lifted and the reek entering my body via nostrils and lungs and bronchioles—the extremes of existing inside a body: the horror and the joy. The knowledge of these things would only follow us. And if Tommy were to feel that life and sustenance required the eating of another being’s shit, then that thought could arrive just as easily across the Texas state line, at the edges of a sprawling cattle ranch, or at the base of a Montezuma cypress in the foothills of the Sierra Madre. There was no escaping this.

But, I decided, I did have the power to identify one thing—one lone precious thing—that was worthwhile and to move toward it. I had the power to take it with me and flee.

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