My Dog Corduroy the Crime-Fighting Hound
1.
My dog is a retired racing dog called Luca.
I’m not allowed to call him a rescue, and I’m not allowed to use his image to promote anti-racing propaganda so all I’ll say is he arrived to us with a broken tail and one and a half ears and a deep terror of the crate we had made cosy for him—
I think that tells you all you need to know.
My dog Luca reminds me that even on very sad days you can still piss and shit and go outside and enjoy the earth and the sky and the neighbourhood. In fact you must do these things.
My dog Luca really loves to collect our soft belongings and carry them gently in his long mouth to the spare bedroom to create a makeshift shrine to be comforted by.
My dog Luca has taken a particular liking to small pumpkins and abandoned dumbbells and my green corduroy jacket which he favours above the many cushions we have gifted him.
My dog Luca sleeps for 16 hours a day, like a cat, if you had a cat with 17 elbows and a face like a bicycle seat.
2.
When he sleeps, he makes these contented little sighs and I like to imagine that in his dreams he is Detective Corduroy, the crime-fighting hound. He is putting his paws up on his large oak desk and lighting a pipe after a long day of investigating. He is staring in a satisfied way at his many certificates and accolades. He is bidding goodnight to his attractive assistant who everyone makes vulgar jokes about and who is secretly about to become a successful novelist. He is putting on a well-tailored overcoat.
His most recent case is a strange one. After many months of late and sleepless nights (o, his long-suffering wife! o, his poor children!) he has discovered the location of an underground gambling ring. Hounds are caging men in these cramped kennels, crates of them stacked one on top of another like animals. The men are kept purposefully underweight and incredibly toned. They are given real estate brochures in briefcases for sustenance. They are dressed in smart suits and given names like Duke Manfred or Doctor Economy. The hounds place tax-free bets on their favourite men and on the weekends they force them to run around a dusty and dangerous track, chasing a small model of a tidy three-bedroom house in a good neighbourhood, round and round they run until they are broken or bruised or dead or hacking up blood at the finish line—
3.
My dog Luca always wakes up very suddenly
and immediately seeks something
soft and gentle.
Ray Shipley is/has at various times been a bookseller, librarian, poet, comedian, youth worker, and writing tutor. Born and raised in Ōtautahi, Aotearoa, Ray now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where they marvel at the low cost of fruits, admire medieval buildings, and miss their friends. Ray has won the Christchurch Poetry Slam four times, and placed third nationally in 2018. Their work has been published in Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word (University of Queensland Press, 2019), Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa (Auckland University Press, 2021), takahē, and Catalyst, among others.