fiction for children by Roger B Rueda
Douglas’s mother, Coring, was often cross at his rudeness. So, when his father, a Korean, told his mother that he’d go on vacation to Busan the next week, she suggested that Douglas visit Korea, too. He had to go to live with his father’s kin. He had not experienced this kind of holiday before, so Coring thought it’d be nice if Douglas knew, too, some Korean things and culture. He was all of six and he seemed to be very Filipino rather than being a Korean.
Douglas had erratic Korean. At home, the family spoke Tagalog, Korean, and a little English. He went to a Chinese school in Makati, so he was quite a multilingual boy.
Everywhere he went, a mischievous child, he would rock back and forth in his chair. His teacher would shout at him. He was a wicked and obstinate boy. He would sometimes pull his classmate’s hair. His candy or chocolate wrappers would litter anywhere. He’d swear at his classmates and run off. He would keep his classmates’ bags in the santan hedge. He would smile at other kids impishly. He was very noisy and boisterous. He would coax his classmates into clambering over sacksful of jackfruits at the back of the school building or catching bugs holing up underneath the firewood.
After chewing his bubble gum, he would stick it underneath the arm of his chair. He would kick the kittens or puppies hard. One time, he was bitten by a pooch as he was quite liable to be.
He removed the gills of all the fish in the aquarium in his teacher’s room. All the fish were floating lifeless in the fuchsia water. His teacher, when she saw it, suddenly fell forward on to the table and fainted. His mother scolded him for that, but he was a spoilt brat.
Every summer, usually, Douglas would spend his vacation in Davao, with his maternal grandparents, who were nettled by his manner. He was getting bored with Davao, perhaps. So that summer, Douglas was excited on a trek through the Busan shops. Finally, he met some kids of Korean descent. But sometimes he’d have a terrible quarrel with them. They would squabble over some toys and knickknacks.
One day, he was in a room with a load of drunken men who had been boozing all afternoon. One of them was his father, Minwoo. One waitron served the boy stew. He took his time and ate slowly. He liked the taste. It was surprisingly good, he thought. It was a bit hot, spicy, and sweet at the same time.
‘What was that?’ he asked.
‘Boshintang,’replied the man.
‘What is boshintang?’ He’d never heard it from his father.
‘Dog, dog stew’ came a cheerful replied from the man.
His eyes seemed slightly widened. He seemed surprised that he’d eaten dog. He thought eating dog was just a joke. He started to believe then that everything was possible if people wanted it enough. He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled amazingly at the waitron.
He took his camera and asked the man to take a picture of dog stew. When he arrived home, he uploaded his pictures on his Facebook. His mother was the first to like it. But his kindergarten classmates teased him, tongue in cheek. He goaded them in response.
But since then Douglas had become a dog epicure. For months, he would run up and tug at his father’s sleeve excitedly every afternoon when his father met his friends downtown. Minwoo was a bit of a boozer. He liked drinking shochu with dog. His parents raised dog for meat.
Sometimes, Douglas observed how the dogs were butchered and their meat was hung to dry from the ceiling. The smell of the stew had become his favourite.
When his father and Douglas came back to Makati, the boy asked his father to build a hutch so that they could raise dogs and have a supply of fresh dog. At first, his mother disagreed with eating dog in general. She fell out with her husband, but she failed to convince her husband and her son. She was devoted to her family although they would squabble now and then.
The next day, Minwoo came home, bringing three mongrel puppies with him. Coring was watching a documentary on Arirang, lunch ready on the table. She had been brought up to tend to the needs of her younger siblings, and now she was good at tending Minwoo. Their house had been meticulously cleaned.
‘Oh, look at these puppies! They’re so cute,’ told Minwoo. Coring listened, her expression from poker-faced to blank. The Korean man asked for ice for his beer and proceeded to get contentedly drunk, while the puppies drifted off into a fitful sleep.
‘Lunch’s ready!’ She reminded Minwoo coldly.
Her husband just nodded and smiled. His boutique business was doing fine.
When Douglas arrived with her nanny, he saw the puppies. He took them out of the box. He lifted them out one by one and laid them on the floor. The puppies were reluctant to walk. He looked at them, almost slobbering. He thought of dog stew.
‘Papa, when can I eat them?’ asked Douglas.
‘Anytime, but let them mature first,’ his father rubbed his head tenderly, looking affectionately at him.
‘I want it now,’ he began laughing and giggling as he hugged his father, his father tickling him. The house was filled with their voices from the kitchen.
***
One evening, all at once, Douglas metamorphosed into a dog and emerged onto the street. He rose yelping and bolted into the greeneries. He heard himself gasp and cry out. His arms were tired, and his back was tense. He yawned, and stretched lazily. Well along, under the trees, he heard no further sounds. He felt asleep.
His deep sleep was disturbed when three dogs were trying to escape from dog-eaters who were making determined efforts to catch the dogs.
Douglas ran off, too, losing his nerves. He joined the dogs, the dogs his family were raising in the hutch.
He was afraid of them initially. He was shaking and deeply in shock.
‘I’m Douglas. I’m not a dog. I’m so shocked to see that I have become one.’ They four walked through the dense bush for hours. He took a breather. The other dogs, too.
The three dogs looked at him. Their legs were pitifully thin compared to the rest of their bulk. They maintained a kind of meekness. Douglas sat speechless with confusion, gazing into the sky.
‘Please talk to me.’ Douglas was a dog which desperately needed an answer to what had become of him.
The three dogs lapped the saliva from his snout, his eyes filled with tears.
‘I’m Yotot.’ The black dog started to speak.
‘I’m Maya,’ said the brown bitch.
‘I’m Odi.’ The third dog was painfully shy of other dogs. It was black with white front paws and a white splotch on its chest.
It was quite a shock to see dogs speak, for Douglas. But he asked them a lot of questions. They shared stories about them.
‘How come that I’ve become a dog.’ Douglas was intensely curious about the world he had now. But no one knew the answer. All they knew was that they, too, were kids then.
Going hungry for days, they got lost and strayed into dangerous areas. Douglas was too weak to move or think or speak. Maya scavenged through garbage. The two other dogs scavenged the bones.
‘Shoo, dogs, shoo.’ Some people avoided dogs. Sometimes, they stoned them to leave.
Towards the evening, the four dogs tried to rest their exhausted body under an elastic awning, all lying motionless. Their situation created a very special bond between them.
At dawn, they woke to find the dark place lit by flashing lights. They were sitting huddled, cornered by dog-eaters.
Douglas got very upset and screamed and swore, throwing tantrums all over the gin. He let out a string of roaring barks. One dog-eater whipped him with studded belt. He felt a sharp pain in his lower back and that caused him to settle down.
The other dogs were taken out of the gin. Their legs were tied and mouths, muzzled. They cried with fear and vulnerability. Douglas stared with a long, doleful look of disbelief. He felt a sudden tender pity for them.
One dog-eater whacked two of the three dogs on the head, causing them to spurt blood. They croaked quickly. The other dog and Douglas were in the lurch, too. He went rigid with fear, expelling a lot of urine.
The men lifted out the other dog and sold it to another dog-eater. Douglas was held in reserve for tomorrow’s boozing. He lay stock-still, calm, his eyes weary. The uncanny situation unnerved him more.
‘Douglas, what should I do?’ it woofed worriedly.
Douglas didn’t say anything. Douglas pierced the gin with his canine teeth, on the quite. When the hole was big enough for him to escape, Douglas tore off down the street. He looked around searchingly. He was scared stiff of the dog-eaters whose faces with drooping moustaches. One man had the words ‘Dora loves Spiderman’ tattooed on his left shin.
The dog-eaters gave chase and began to shoot Douglas at point blank range with an automatic rifle. There was so much blood it had soaked through his white fur.
The dog-eaters hoisted and flung him to the ground, bleeding profusely. He had lain awake all night, tormented by Maya’s yowling, as the place throbbed with dog cries.
***
Douglas was sitting huddled on the floor shivering with fear. The room was silent except for his sobbing. His mother, Coring, entered the room briskly and gave him a hug, the barking of Maya resonating in his head still. He gave a sudden cry of pain and put his hand to his heart.
He felt his arms. His skin was clear and smooth. His spell was gone, he thought.
‘Mama, I’ll never ever eat dog,’ he said to his mother in a throaty voice. Hurriedly, he ran to see his three dogs in the hutch. His face relaxed into a happy smile when he saw the three dogs were alive. He released them selflessly, with emotion. The dogs started going ‘woof woof’ and sprang as Douglas undid the hutch door. They wagged their tails on tenterhooks.
‘Mama, meet Yotot, Maya, and Odi.’ The dogs rose awkwardly to his feet and licked Douglas's hands excitedly. They went deathly pale, but he promised to nurse them back to health because then it was only his nanny who had fed the dogs. He swept his arms over his friends’ shoulders as if they knew each other very well. He was very sorry about all the selfishness and inhumaneness he'd done. He petted and smoothed their fur.
***
Back home, he’d play with, feed, and bathe the dogs. Douglas and his parents would spend their weekend walking the dogs around their local streets. As a schoolboy, he dreamed of becoming a veterinarian and animal rights activist one day. Sometimes, the family would bring along pieces of bread or bones from a barbecue restaurant after eating out and feed their pets. The cynophiles also became very solicitous of all animals around them.
Douglas was planning to visit his grandparents in Busan and convince them to stop eating dog. For now, he wrote them a letter, telling them how shameful eating dog was. Attached to his letter were colourful pictures and drawings of his dogs and their family.
He also started to write his story and of his dogs so that kids around the world would be acutely aware that dogs had been human beings in their past lives.
He was expecting his father to publish it before long because now only his classmates and schoolmates could see and read his storybook his mother and he had made by hand.
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