Fleazy

Fleazy was a very naturally high-spirited dawg who lived roundabouts the riverside. Well, he had since he’d eaten his mistress a few seasons ago. He’d found her at the bottom of the stairs one morning, and started to lick her face, as he always did, but this time encountered no resistance. So he kept on going. Having got as far as he reasonably could in one sitting, he noticed the front door was open, and to pile pleasure on pleasure, was able to defaecate freely on his favourite place in the middle of the pavement. Fleazy was not one to anticipate pleasure, but freely accepted all life’s benefits. Without any apparent competition, he’d since been able to establish himself as the pack leader of the towpath, mostly by dint of expressing his own natural gifts. He could drool impressively, and was acknowledged champion at all the recognised events, hacking, puddling and stringing. Any dog who could master all three disciplines was a natural leader. Having retained most of his ears, and a large proportion of his tail after many years in the open ground, he still considered himself attractive to mates, even those whose size and gender rendered them a little resistant to pleasuring. His steel wool-like coat provided good grip and claw protection, and there were some usefully sized tree stumps in the park that helped alieviate some of the practical difficulties of rogering toy breeds. His other great and admired gift was in digestive ability. He could convert any number of shiny crisp and primary-coloured chocolate bar wrappers into a uniform khaki sludge within fifteen minutes max, and this latter well-formed but deceptively slippery when strategically placed.
Few on the riverside could challenge Fleazy, nor would they want to. By natural instinct they were brainless followers, empty-eyed whiners, crappers and blinders of small children. Yes, despite the variation in size, shape, colour and voice, they were all dogs. At least, so far as the experimental human leg shagging had failed to produce any DNA-sustaining results.
Blissfully unaware of their own mortality, Fleazy’s band frolicked in the mud and excrement of the riverside, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun, but always full to the brim with excitement and viciousness. Some still bore the tattered leather collars of a past life. Some still had plastic charms still loosely attached. Fleazy himself had the colour-drained remnants of a hand-woven choker, which curiously came to be his downfall. A rat caught his attention one spring day. Yes, one of those vague days when nature’s colour reception snaps on again in isolated places, and the tides begin to rise.
Always up for a game of chase- and if lucky, eat- the rat, he bounded joyfully down he steps, along the terrace of twisted willows and dinghy carcasses, nosing the rodent’d spoor and staying dogfully on its trail as it weaved and skittered through the stunted reeds and tangled carrier bags, skilfully leading Fleazy two paces further away from his family lair with each orbit of his territory. But Fleazy was as lucky as he was stupid. A superb and unfamiliar turd distracted him for a split second, and when he looked up again, the rat had gone. Fleazy selected a direction at random, and crashed with chest out and paws flailing against the bank. Which gave way unexpectedly. By pure chance- or was it instinct? he found himself in the centre of the rat’s home burrow, a smorgasbord of rat kinder and surprise eggs, panicking rodents and neurasthenic aromas. He blissed out. Matted fur, excrement, screeching terror- noise, knife-sharp pain… what canine paradise was this? It brought about a moment of stillness, a moment of ‘being the dog’. Not giving way to distraction nor instinct, not analysing potentials of satisfaction or discomfort, threat or opportunities for domination, but pure, pleasurable existence. He was a dog, experiencing dogness at its highest plane. Does this happen more than once in a dog’s life? Does the dog even know it can happen, despite their consistent and tireless pursuit of this one apparent but widely unattained and imaginary goal? So happy was Fleazy that it didn’t even bother him that all the rats had fled without him managing to taste one. There were plenty more dregs here to bury his muzzle in. And it was just the moment for the perfect shit, in fact. It could go there, over where the water was lapping at the lower edge of the hole he had burst in the bankside burrow. He slithered his arse backward in that direction, dragging it pleasurably over the gritty pebbles that made up the floor of the passage. Then a sudden, more forceful wave of river water surged up below his tail; yet another new and pleasant experience to add to this wonderful day. Fleazy was to die incalculably happy. His handwoven neck scarf was, as it happens, snagged on a willow root that protruded into the burrow. More water was flushing in, the blessed spring tide excoriating the mean left-overs of winter. Fleazy was a part of that cleansing, as his neckscarf eventually rotted and his bloated body was released into the current after several risings and fallings of the river.
The last of the gang watched admiringly from the towpath. ‘It’s how he would have wanted it’, one of them remarked. Although none of the dogs shared any sort of language. It was just a general canine consensus, needing neither expression nor conscious realisation. Then they fell to shagging each other again.