12. THE PILE DOG PART 2

When I implied the pile dog never tricked anybody, I only meant it in the strictest sense: she never successfully deceived anyone as the result of a purposeful action.

But she did confuse a lot of people.

One symptom of end-stage liver disease is a distended stomach. Fluid builds up in the abdomen, and it keeps going like that, and pretty soon your dog looks nineteen months pregnant.

You can manage it for a while, but the procedure eventually stops working, and your dog just has to stay like that.

When that happened, our vet told us the end was getting close. A few weeks maybe.

Four months later, the pile dog was still waddling around like the world’s hairiest water balloon.

She just kept going and going. It didn’t even seem like she noticed.

Everybody else did, though. When there’s forty extra pounds of water in your dog, everybody who sees your dog will immediately think, OH MY GOD… WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED??

The least horrifying possibility they can think of is pregnancy. But this looks way weirder than pregnancy. To look like that, a dog would have to be so pregnant that the pregnancy loops back around and gets pregnant inside the original pregnancy several times over. And it couldn’t be puppies—it’d have to be snakes or something.

It makes people concerned.

They don’t want to jump to conclusions… it’s probably just an extremely advanced form of pregnancy… but nobody feels sure enough to let it slide. They cross the street and trickle out of their houses to ask when she’s due, just in case it was ten months ago and we didn’t realize.

That’s a tough question to field five times a day when the real answer is “No, sorry… the reason she looks like that is because she is dying.”

You can’t lie, though. People follow up on it.

It’s also pretty hard to avoid the question. These are good people—they’re trying to make sure you aren’t doing something weird to this poor, bloated dog. They won’t stop asking questions until they have the explanation.

She survived so long it became summer. We had to shave her.

Right after we shaved her, we found out that—despite looking like a diabetic manatee from outer space—she didn’t have enough body fat to stay warm even when it’s 85 degrees. We had to buy her a sweater. In July.

She already looked pretty confusing, and I don’t fully understand why this was the case, but the sweater made it way worse.

Nobody knows what to do with that. If that comes at them, they don’t even know where to start.

The most appropriate crescendo for this would probably be the time our AC broke.

When the repairman came by to fix it, he seemed wary of the pile dog—like he wasn’t sure how he should be interacting with her.

She was waddling laps through the house like usual, poking around in different places, making friendly little snorting sounds to say hi on her way past, and the repairman kept staring at her with this strained expression on his face.

We assumed he was just lukewarm about dogs, or maybe he didn’t know the best way to approach the subject of what was wrong with her.

Fifteen minutes later, he finally worked up the courage to ask what kind of animal she was.

Which is a risky question.

You don’t ask that question if it’s just a little ambiguous.

You don’t even ask that question if you have guesses—any guesses at all. Absolutely nobody wants to seem like the sort of fool who can’t tell the difference between a goat and a pony. If there’s a chance it’s an animal you’ve heard of, it isn’t worth it.

The only person who would ask that question is somebody who’s fully stumped and believes it might be a type of animal they’ve never seen before.