The Family Dog

The painting was named “The Family Dog.” It was ironic because he was all alone and because George had gotten the painting for his wife in lieu of a real dog, which she wanted in lieu of a child. This dog in the painting, seated, wearing a suit and tie, smoking a Holmesian pipe, had been talking to him for two weeks by the time George decided to listen.

Before then George was sure it was a hallucination or the manifestation of some kind of neurosis. Maybe it was just an odd delusion, a stand in for his wife’s doleful looks, the words she didn’t say though he knew she thought.

It wasn’t like the dog had any powers besides the already baffling one of speech. For example, he couldn’t come out of the painting. For all George could tell, it couldn’t even move from the recliner it was sitting on. All this painted dog could do was talk.

But boy could it talk. George, do this. George, do that. Clean this room, George. Why don’t you just kill your wife, George? You know you want to. Stuff like that. Nag, nag, nag. It was almost the direct opposite of George’s silent wife, who often sat beneath the painting as it talked.

George did not let on that he heard anything. He was certain should he acknowledge hearing the talking dog that it would never shut up. He was equally certain if he just ignored it long enough it would go away.

Even to take the painting off the wall and throw it out had seemed too much of an admission to the dog that he had heard every word the dog said.

But after the second week, with its babbling becoming worse instead of better, George decided to listen.

He pulled up a chair and set it before the painting.

“All right,” George said. “You want to talk, go ahead and talk.”

“I knew you could hear me. You weren’t fooling anyone.”

The dog’s mouth moved when it talked but nothing else did. Not even the eyes.

“What do you want, dog?”

“I want simply this,” the dog said. “For you to do my bidding.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I will be forced to employ other means of persuasion.”

“Such as?”

“Pray you never find out.”

“Are you the same dog who was talking to the Son of Sam?”

“My cousin,” the dog admitted. “An amateur. Hardly worth considering.”

“I see.”

“You see nothing, human.”

“Of course.”

At this point George took out his pocket knife and cut a big X in the painting.

“What the hell?” the dog barked.

George said, “Not dead yet?”

“You will need more than a pocket knife.”

George took the painting off the wall and carried it to the fireplace. Smiling, he lit a fire. When he was about to throw the painting inside, the dog said, “Wait a minute. Okay, okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“Do you know how much effort it takes to haunt a painting?”

“No.”

“Lots,” said the dog.

George held him over the fire.

“You can’t really hurt me, can you?”

“No,” the dog admitted. “Hell, have a heart.”

George put the painting back on the wall.

“I’m not going to do what you tell me,” George said.

“I figured that,” the dog said. “But I don't care about that. I just hate you. You don't know what it's like being stuck and watching some guy who can move and doesn't, refuses. The truth of the matter is I'm sick of being a dog in a painting. And that’s why I told your wife to—“

But it never got to finish because George and the dog exploded with the bomb George’s wife had set between the fireplace logs.