END MUSIC | Pasha Malla

The dog and I have a band, The Fucked Guys. We play dreg rock. We used to be The Dregs but we broke up, reformed, reconfigured, started anew. The dog’s on bass. Literally stands on it. I feed him treats and he dances around the strings and we loop that shit through some pedals and voila, wall of sound. I’m on everything else: bongos, keys, tapes, guitar, big box of nails, Pope photo, kazoo. The dog howls and so do I. The dog whinges and I scream. I don’t scream at the dog, though, ever. We’re friends. Man’s best and all that. (Dog’s best, i.e. me to him.) Couldn’t quit him if I tried, though one time he quit the band — just up and left like we weren’t even a thing. Out the door and into the night, and I had naught to go on but the ticking of his nails all the way down to the lake, where we sat for a while in the soft, soft sand watching the waves scramble the moon. Put my arm around him, leaned in. Knock of his heart like a metronome. “Good,” I said, “boy.” Then right back to the studio, rather the rehearsal space, rather the house, rather my room, rather my bed, rather my pillow, the two of us lying there cheek to cheek. That’s when he started singing, sweet as a ghost, the tiredest lullaby I’d ever damn heard. Of course he’ll die. One day he’ll die. And what will become of us then?

Pasha Malla’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Walrus, the Journey Prize Stories, a ‘Notable Story’ in Best American Nonrequired Reading (edited by Dave Eggers),Toronto Noir, Taddle Creek, and GreenTOpia. The Withdrawal Method, his first book, was longlisted for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Best First Book) and won both the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Trillium Book Award.