CADENCE CHUNG
Animal
That was the summer I killed a dog. I’d just bought myself a new Maison Louis Marie that everyone was saying smelled like piss. You smell like a boy, my mother had said. I didn’t care — it made me feel like a machine. I’d never looked so good in my life. Bouncers asked me into clubs; men would stare as I bounded down the street in my half-priced Max slip skirts. I got a discount from work, and so every payday I’d go and buy a whole set of new outfits. I’d started running out of coat hangers, so I’d hang seven or eight dresses on each one, and they often snapped from the weight.
I’ve always thought it was funny, anyway, how people say perfumes smell like a boy. They’re normally referring to some offensive EDT with too much unblended patchouli, or something cheap and chemical. But that’s not how boys smell at all — they’re sort of warm and sweet; dusky; as if the smell comes from their heat in a bedsheet; physicality itself. David didn’t smell like that, though. He always used that Diptyque set with the matching body wash and moisturiser. When I saw that in his bathroom I could have wept. It made me wish I could be one of those vanilla Kayali girls, the type who blast you with an eye-watering sugary sweetness when you walk past them, or enter a room where they’ve been.
And the dog wasn’t my fault. Ever since I was a child, animals have hated me with a fervour that borders on the absurd. My neighbour’s little ragdoll kitten would hide under a bed whenever I came over, ears flattened. My mother’s trio of horrible Siamese things would crowd around each other while I played in my paddle pool, yowling unendingly until she sprayed them with the garden hose. I used to think it was some childhood quirk that I’d grow out of, like eczema or asthma. But even now, dogs pull on their leashes in parks; sparrows don’t dare to steal crumbs from my plate in cafés. I’ve deduced, through no scientific logic but a deep-set, near-religious certainty, that there is something in my chemical makeup that causes revulsion in anything warm-blooded. Through some pheromonal phenomenon, creatures recognise me as something to run from.
‘I think I might get a nose piercing,’ I said to my mother, on one of those days we sat at the dining room table for hours and did crosswords. I had my own apartment, a shoeboxy one-bedroom thing with a queen-sized bed and not much else, marginally better than someone’s basement. I did like the ritual of scanning my swipe card at the automatic doors, going up in the clean silver lift, unlocking the heavy door; it all felt very grown up. But I also liked going home and saying provocative things in the hope that something would get a rise out of my mother.
‘Maybe I’ll start dating women,’ I went on. ‘Or dye my hair red.’
‘Whatever you want,’ she said, looking down at the newspaper. ‘I think I’ve found five across.’
I met David when he came into the store to get a fitting. They always placed me at the very first counter when you walked in. The dodgy old boss who’d often come in and give me a high five said that it was the most pleasant experience for the men, to see me first thing. Men are visual creatures, he’d always say. Not that he ever really followed his own ethos. He never wore stuff from the store, always dressed in ill-fitting, floppy suits, because he was too cheap to use even his own products. Sometimes he’d bring me little gifts: out-of-season sweaters, broken combs, beard oil testers. I used the oil to shave my legs.
David came into the store like a prodigal son — even though I hadn’t seen him before, he seemed to exude the energy that he was already familiar with any place he entered. He announced his need for a suit fitting like he was asking an old friend to do him a favour. There was something charmingly self-effacing about him, his slightly dorky posture that rounded out his short and almost squabby frame. I loved a man who was a little feminine. This girl I used to work with at a makeup store always went for men who played in bands and didn’t wash often enough, and I always wondered what the appeal was. I never liked their confidence, the way they wrapped their hands around their girlfriends’ thighs like they were tightening a microphone stand.
‘What’s the special occasion?’ I asked, as I pulled the tape measurer down to his ankle.
‘A funeral, actually,’ he said. ‘I haven’t needed a suit for a long time — nobody I know has really died or gotten married…’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said automatically, noting the unexpected width of his chest. He shrugged in his little Ralph Lauren polo.
‘No, no, don’t worry. It was one of those ones you expect, you know? Everyone starts talking about who’s inheriting this or that necklace right in front of her — my grandmother, that is — and once everyone’s lost that sense of tact you know they think she’s going to die soon enough that it won’t matter if she’s mad at them.’
‘Yeah,’ I replied. He talked very animatedly and it was hard to get anything done with him moving so much.
‘It’s the strangest thing, too — at the rest home they had this cat that knew when people were going to die. It would jump on their beds and lie there with them until they, you know. Carked it. I don’t know how it could tell.’
He let out a nervous little laugh, which I liked. He had one of those loud, interjecting laughs, that made everything sound funnier than it really was.
‘I guess animals are perceptive like that,’ I said. ‘This actually fits pretty well. Just the sleeves, mainly. They’re a bit long.’
‘Yes, I’ve never been the most proportional person.’ Another laugh.
‘I’ll just need to pin them, and we can adjust them for you.’
‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’
I couldn’t find the smaller-sized pins, so I had to use the stupidly large ones that were mainly for the backs of thick dresses, the mock-brocade stuff our sister stores sold. The absent-minded way he was watching me made my fingers slip — or maybe it was the Le Labo body butter I’d doused myself in that morning — and I swiped the tip of the pin against his wrist. A bead of neat red blood birthed itself like a pearl.
‘Oh, God. I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine,’ he laughed. He stared at me for a moment. ‘Look, do you want to come to my place after your shift?’
His house was like a house from a movie — not the American McMansion sort but the kind of tasteful wooden-floor delight that you might see a rich single woman living in. I excused myself to the bathroom as soon as I arrived. And there they were. The Diptyque matching set. A trio of full-sized Tom Ford: Tobacco Vanille, Oud Wood, Neroli Portofino. Aesop handwash. I picked up a bevelled blue bottle of Versace Eros and slipped it into my handbag.
When I left the bathroom, he was already waiting in his high-ceilinged bedroom. I pounced on him without a second thought.
I left his place sweaty-thighed and still adjusting the skewed strap of my bra — the label was digging into my back from where I’d tangled it in the hooks. I walked down the road of the strange little suburb he lived in, feeling as if I’d caught some delicious prize. As I passed a fence, the sound of barking followed me — something I was used to. I kept walking, but paused when I heard a loud clacking, like something heavy had landed on the concrete. I turned to find what I’m sure was the dream family dog; a golden retriever. Its eyes were brown and bright, its mouth pink-tipped, its nose wet. I just knew that it was the subject of thousands of sticky pats from children’s hands. The recipient of bone-shaped treats; the sweetest companion on walks. Now it stared at me with its teeth twisted into a brown-edged snarl, then charged.
I remembered suddenly a time in childhood when Dad had sat me down and told me how to defend myself against anything his paranoid mind could think of: serial killers, abductors, abusers — and dogs.
‘You have to let them nearly land on you,’ he said. ‘Then you grab their front legs and pull them outwards. Kills them instantly. You have to know how to defend yourself. I’ve never let myself get hurt. Although it helps to have testosterone; makes men different from women. So you need to try extra hard with this stuff — you don’t have a natural advantage.’
I’d nodded, then, but also knew he was full of shit, really. He’d never defended himself against anything in his office-worker life, despite having a handful of medals from various martial arts classes he took as a teenager. And he never defended himself against my mother.
It was when I was around three that they left me in the kiddie pool for hours. People say that memories from around that age are normally imagined — you get told them so many times by family members that you believe them as your own. But I know that this was my own memory, because my parents never talked about it. It was another summer, and they forgot about me in that pool until it was a cold, dark, mosquito-infested hour. My dad was meant to be the one watching me, and my mum yelled at him from the corner of the bathroom as she rubbed me all over with strawberry shampoo in the hot bath. I don’t remember much, but I remember the sickliness of that fake strawberry scent, and the crunch of the Pamol she gave me for the fever that came after. And then, the most delicious part — the ambroxan-metallic huff of her inhaler she gave me when I coughed all night. I faked a cough for weeks, even after it had fully gone away, just to get another Mercedes-sleek medical breath into my lungs.
I remember this because I know what kind of a child I was. And because the Siameses were right. I remember it because it was the first time I’d ever really, really wanted something.
The retriever launched itself at me. I grabbed its scrappy little ankles, and pulled outwards as hard as I could. It let out a cartoony whimper, then collapsed. I pulled its body off of me; it lay limp on the pavement. I kicked it to the side, then ran away from it as fast as I could.
‘Are you wearing my cologne?’ David asked, as I lay on his bed the week after.
‘Maybe,’ I replied. ‘Would you mind?’
‘No. Keep it. It smells better on you,’ he said, smiling. ‘You add something… I don’t know. Sensual to it. It makes me feel… like I could do anything. Sorry, that doesn’t make any sense. Maybe you know what I mean. You’re just amazing. It scares me a bit.’
He shifted, and the slight rolls of his stomach revealed themselves. I liked that he thought that. I liked that he thought he was the one chasing, that he was doing anything at all.
I lay awake while he slept. His head resting on the pillow looked as innocent as a toddler drowning in a kiddie pool. He looked so vulnerable. A sad featherless baby bird.
When I was sure that he was asleep, I pulled his arm towards me and found the scratch on his wrist, nearly fully healed, with only one tiny dot of scab. I peeled it off and slowly sucked out all the blood that came, the bitterness of it a shock against his scented skin.
He was so, so asleep. So innocent. I could have done anything, anything I wanted.
Cadence Chung is a poet, mezzo-soprano, and composer, currently one of the resident artists at Te Pae Kōkako - The Aotearoa New Zealand Opera Studio. She has released three books: anomalia (Tender Press, 2022), Mythos: an Audio-Visual Anthology of Art by Young New Zealanders, (ed.) (Wai-te-Ata Press, 2024), and Mad Diva (Otago University Press, 2025). She also edits Symposia Magazine and the New Zealand Poetry Society’s quarterly magazine, a fine line.