LET’S SAY YOU run out of money in a city that doesn’t know you, and the only job they find for you is killing dogs on the night shift. Your car dies. Your apartment is not quite far enough from the shelter. That distant sound of barking dogs is amplified by your memory, by dreams, so that it fills your grainy, sleepless mornings, the way that barking fills the shelter like water, a thick, swirling weight of sound that makes it hard to move, that spills out of the shelter, that ebbs and subsides and then, one dog at a time, starts again. Every kind of sound, yipping shih tzus, baying coonhounds, Pomeranians and Dobermans and vocalizing mutts. Some of the dogs bark so long and loud that they lose their voices before you can kill them, they go out with puny squeaks, shaking their heads, wondering what’s wrong. You give them a shot, pile them in the chamber, pump the air out. Then the incinerator. The trees that you remember every morning in your dreams, midwestern oaks and elms and leafy poplars, are shrunk to bitter twigs here.
What do You think about A Stranger In This World (2012)?
