During bewildering times such as the present, the divide between fiction and reality is increasingly blurry and we turn to stories to make sense of our predicament. With our brand-new #DystopianTales series, we bring to you exclusive short pieces on a world that seems to be falling apart.

Doggy and Me

by Tejaswini Apte-Rahm

Headless waits for me. Headless is a dog. He is literally headless: just a yellow and black streamlined body and four scampering legs, all steel and aluminium, as big and powerful as an Alsatian. Fortunately, he is a robot, so being headless does not bother him. In fact, he is smarter than any dog that ever lived, so the lack of a head isn’t going to give him an inferiority complex. I ruminate on whether he is smart enough to know about complexes and about related emotions like humiliation and one-upmanship. I suspect he does, because he seems to take pleasure in humiliating me. (I am now dragged sideways into contemplating whether he actually feels pleasure; and whether he ‘feels’. Perhaps he is simply programmed to feel. But, if so, the difference between feeling and being programmed to feel is pedantic, surely.) And the question of pleasure: is that just me, anthropomorphizing him into having doggy characteristics? Either way, there’s clearly a reason why they made him dog-shaped: it shapes my response to him. (Darn it, I keep calling him ‘him’ instead of ‘it’.) He scampers along with that endearing jog-trot peculiar to dogs and dressage ponies. And he looks after me. A personal guard dog. But without a head, to make him just that little bit more menacing. By the way, he isn’t ‘personal’ though I had to pay for him (we all had to, like it or not). He comes pre-programmed and receives regular wireless updates about things. All kinds of things. Whether I’m allowed to leave the house. What time that might be. He reads out hourly announcements about riots and death rates and infection curves and the particulate matter in the air and its relation to viral transmission rates.

I have to send an application to the dog via an app, and he (it! IT!) tells me my place in the queue of people waiting in their homes to get out. Sometimes I think he’s just taking the piss, because the other day there wasn’t a soul on the street, and yet his headless voice announced all morning that there were too many people outdoors at the moment. He said that I was next in line. But I was ‘next’ for hours. I waited, staring at my door, fully dressed, for five hours. And then, for the first time, I was a bad girl. I tried to slip out while he was patrolling the back of the house. When I’m good and do what he says, he speaks to me in a rather pleasant human voice. But when I disobeyed him, he galloped towards me, unleashing snarls of such violence that I thought he would find a way to tear my throat out. He knocked me over and pinned me down, one hard paw on each shoulder as I lay flat on my back, stunned by the hard blow to my head on the stone steps. He looked down at me with two red blinking spots which I assume are meant to be eyes. The electric shock he administered immobilized me for an hour, leaving me spreadeagled and undignified on my doorstep. But my eyes remained open so I could see my neighbour’s eyes peering out at me (he looked me up and down for the entire hour), and also the masked miscreants who stole my purse. That’s what I mean when I say that Headless knows something about humiliation: he didn’t do a thing to defend me against those goons. So much for personal protection. Though I assume he saved me from the virus that day. I can’t fathom what led me to try and disobey him. I guess I just lost my head.

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Tejaswini Apte-Rahm is the author of These Circuses that Sweep Through the Landscape

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