[ WP ] You do n't remember ever owning the family dog , but everyone else seems to ...

*They're multiplying*, he thinks, as he watches them wrestle each other onto their backs, teeth raking across the soft skin of belly and throat. Dogs do multiply, he knows that, along with the birds and the bees and all the shining fish of the sea, but this seems somewhat unorthodox. They circle around an invisible nucleus, pulsating, dividing, a single organism engaged in the process of mitosis. 
 
 `` How many dogs do we have?'' he asks his daughter, Julie, who has descended from her room just long enough to slam a handful of pocky sticks into her mouth. Their bare tips protrude as she talks, bobbing like the backwards end of a sword fight. 
 
 `` Four,'' she mumbles, and crunches down and swallows. `` Peanut, Moxy, Ribbon, and Alphonse. Why?'' 
 
 `` Nothing, nothing,'' he says, and looks out the window and counts. The light brown one that must be Peanut is tearing into another one's throat, another is off to the side snapping at its ear, one is screaming and - 
 
 He squeezes his eyes shut and presses fingers down against his eyelids. They are going fluid, in a constant state of motion, Peanut, Moxy, Ribbon, and Alphonse disintegrating into a flurry of fur and teeth and hot and panting mouths. He opens his eyes again and there are five of them, definitely six of them, blurring, barking, shrieking, circling into the wind. If he concentrates, if he lets the world around him blur and focuses only on his own state of mind, he can not remember buying even a single dog to begin with. 
 
 `` How long have we had these dogs?'' he calls up the stairs, and Julie, still partway up, peeks down over the banister. 
 
 `` I dunno.'' She shrugs. `` Forever. Since I was a toddler, at least. They'd slobber all over me.'' 
 
 `` And there were six of them back then?'' he says, testing. 
 
 `` Uh, I do n't know,'' she says. Only her head is visible, hair falling past her face as she looks down at him. `` I do n't think I could tell all of them apart?'' 
 
 `` And how many dogs,'' he says, `` do we have now?'' 
 
 A tiny furrow forms between her eyes, her fingers grasp the banister and become visible. `` Dad?'' she says. `` Are you okay? Are you, like...'' He watches her mouth the words'going senile', and then decide against it. `` Are you having memory problems or something? Because we ought to tell mom if you are.'' 
 
 He looks back out at the dogs, unleashed now, tearing at each other with the ferocity of a hurricane. Their howls rattle the windows in their frames, their paws tear free clumps of grass, leave gouges in the lawn. They suck in breath, and he feels the air pressure drop. He puts his hand against the window and feels the air tremble through the glass. 
 
 `` Remind me again,'' he says. `` Tell me their names.'' 
 
 And from high above his daughter opens her mouth, and begins to sing the song that ends the world.
