Shadows of the Dog

I wrote this many moons ago. It has explicit language from quoted material. If that is something that you shy away from, please consider skipping this story. All specific locations and names from this story have been scrubbed. Not in attempts to encourage anonymity or a loss of memory, but rather to ensure the focus of the story is not on the specific characters or places where these events transpired but rather on the theme they illustrate.

Elton John sat down at a piano in May of ’73 and recorded a song — a personal anthem — named “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” It was a story of leaving behind the road of no control, a stone pavement where “the dogs of society howl.”

Elton ran away from that road, but almost half a century later, we are pummeling straight for it. And the dogs are howling.

“Y’all got 45 minutes, after that we are pulling over everything that moves….hide your kids, hide your wife, because the purge…I mean the curfew is starting. Purge, curfew, same thing.”

It was a slip of the tongue in a string of Facebook statuses and videos of barren streets by a cop, quickly corrected and brushed aside by a laugh and a joke as they stopped recording. But it would prove to be no laughing matter. Innocuous at the time, the tone of those brief clips set the foundation for a blazing fire.