TEXT: Dog god

Sorry is never sorry enough.

The dog's eyes rose to meet the drooping sunset.

In his bed of pine needles, his sleeping maid, wet with laying, stretched flanks pulling the skin taut across her ribs. His strong mastiff head dipped to smell her ass.

His evening's work—what is the word for the work of a god? His evening's miracles awaited him. The dog arched his cream-colored back and bowed to the valley below him. A smell of cooler winds blew up from the pueblo. He pulled it deep into the back of his throat. His night was rendered in scent. What he must do. What was left to do.

His tongue hung out of his smiling maw. Have you ever felt like you could lift the Earth with your back? Bark down the Sun? Crush the femurs of guilty men with your jaws? His maid slipped her head under his set chin. She smelled the miracles to be done. What was left to do.

She lapped drily at the blood matted in his downy neck fur. Sucking, chewing, cleaning.

He gave a light-hearted laugh as he broke away. Why should he care about mercy? Why did she? The Cross. The Cross told him all that he needed to know.

He loped to the head of the sky's trail to the earth. He was high above the rim of the hills ringing the Holy Land. His thighs hummed with the ache of sex. The drone filled his body. Jaguar Jaguar he breathed his rhythm (forgive him, Oh Lord!) as he ran down the colina to the earth. His lungs drew the wind up the hill. His whiskers combed through branches of pine needles. His decent, a silent, smothering waterfall.