Read Online The Wilds by Julia Elliott - Free Book Online

shepherd, which morphed into a collie, which morphed into a teacup Chihuahua, sending the children into howls of laughter.
    But now in English class a warm miasma of boredom settled on my students. Eyelids fluttered. Heads drooped. The restless among them jogged their knees, tapped their pencils, and glanced toward windows. Tammy Harley, swatting the air in front of her frown, said that Bobby Banes had cut one. A sly smile smoldered on Bobby’s freckled face—poor little Bobby, whose father hosed down the gut room at the poultry plant with scalding bleach water. And then three football players blasted long farts, timing their stunt with hand signals. Children covered their noses. They gasped and pretended to faint. Several cheerleaders scrambled from their seats to the air-conditioning vent, stood panting over it, screaming “Pigs!” and rolling their mascara-crusted eyes.
    My heart beat faster. I shivered. I felt a tingling sensation in my spine. Suddenly, I could detect the salty, rank smell of dogs and I wondered if some of the animals hadbeen sleeping under my portable classroom. Seconds later, Tonya Gooding spotted a dog pack leaping from the trash-strewn copse that separated our school yard from a Burger King parking lot, splitting the day wide open with its barking and feral verve.
    “Damn!” she cried. “Looks like they flying.”
    Though I motioned for the kids to keep their rears glued to their seats, all but Jebediah Jinks, a preteen preacher with eleven siblings, flew to the windows. I took my usual station at the door, sniffing what was now almost palpable in the air.
    “Does anybody smell that?” I asked my students.
    “Smell what?” said Tonya Gooding.
    “‘As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor,’” Jebediah preached from his desk. “A sign of the end times. A plague like frogs or locusts, except only with dogs, or like them swine Jesus put the demons in. We got war, we got AIDS and hurricanes, we got terrorists and obesity and homosexuality and dogs. You think God’s trying to tell us something?”
    The other kids just tittered.
    And the dogs came romping and snarling, tussling and woofing: mongrels big as panthers and little as squirrels, balding curs with skin like burnt cheese, mutts with lions’ manes, canines with dreadlocks matted over their eyes. Short dogs waddled on stumpy legs. Tall dogsloped like spooked gazelles. And the big, rangy fighters led the pack, nipping their inferiors.
    “‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel,’” croaked Jebediah, ogling Tammy Harley’s leopard-print miniskirt. “‘He that dies of Ahab in the city the dogs shall eat; and he that dies in the field, the birds of the sky will devour.’”
    Then I saw Dr. Vilkas sprinting from the woodlet after the pack, camera hoisted, lank hair streaming. My heart lurched. My ears burned. I stepped out onto the porch and locked the children inside. I could barely hear their muffled screams, so loud was the clamor of dogs. The air smelled of Fritos and urine. And hot winds blew, as though the mongrels had brought their own weather. I gripped the railing and watched Dr. Vilkas creep up on a skirmish between two alphas.
    In the middle of the playground, two gape-mouthed fighters were hurling themselves at each other—a liver-colored pit bull against a spotted mastiff. I could hear the clack of their teeth. The dogs growled, retreated, and flew together again, lifting a cloud of orange dust. Dr. Vilkas stood two yards from them, squinting into his camera. When the dust cloud dispersed, the triumphant pit bull was dancing around the fallen mastiff. But then the creature stopped cold, sniffed the wind, and looked right at me. As though fired from a cannon, it flew toward my portable, leapt over a stunted juniper,and landed in the sad little place right below my porch where my children had spit a thousand loogies.
    The dog snarled at me. When it opened its rank maw, I gasped at the