The next morning, he was gone. I called for him, but he did not respond. I found him in the study and sometimes in the spare bedroom when the futon was pulled out. He stared at one of the bookshelves. The one with the jars. I turned on the green rope lights I installed. He turned to me, acknowledged my presence. “You found my collection, Juneau.” He turned back to the jars, focused on one. He stood on his hind legs so that his nose pressed against the dusty glass, leaving a heart shaped mark. The jar scooted slightly back with his touch. It was the eye of a dog, removed due to glaucoma and an infection. I picked it up, and he watched my hand do so. The eye bobbed in the solution of diluted isopropyl and ethanol alcohol. The iris rotated in the movement, settling in my direction. Eyes, even the ones from a dog, are much larger than people think, especially when magnified by the curve of a glass jar. It almost looked like a human eye, or what I would think human eyes outside of the skull would look like. I remember the cloudiness of my grandmother’s eyes, fogged due to both glaucoma and the distance of her fading mind as the dementia ate away at the person she was. The only difference to me was the size of the pupil.

I started collecting wet specimens one day when asked to dispose of a removed cat tooth, yellowed with plaque and hollowed with nerve rot. I asked the lead vet if I could keep it. I thought it would make a neat necklace, like those bleached shark-tooth necklaces from coastal gift shops. But real and with less pooka. Now I had an entire box of canine’s canines. I put the jar back in its place. Juneau’s focus had moved. He looked at one of my favorite pieces, my most liked photo on the wet specimen blog I moderated. A dog’s heart. Its arteries were burst through by heartworms, like spaghetti pushed through the holes of a colander. The worms floated with the heart, reaching toward the outer reaches of the jar. The heart was still swollen from the worms that never made it outside the gray folds. 

I loved Juneau for many months. He never barked or growled. He was a silent dog. A dog of stillness, so antithetical to his nature that it was almost unnerving. It was like watching the subject of a photo move when he walked, a surprise every time. He liked to lick peanut butter off my fingers. He liked to curl up with me at night. But most of all, he liked to watch. I made sure to leave all doors open throughout the apartment so he could follow me. If I closed a door behind me, to shower for example, I would hear his nails scratch at the door, or a disapproving sigh from his nostrils. And he would be distant to me for some time afterward, still watching of course, but from the corner of the room or a hallway. He punished me with his distance. 

And then the fingers began to grow.

I noticed his front paws jutted out further than before and made a note to myself to cut his nails. The next day, his nails had retracted in, mostly on the surface of the nubs, like the fingernails of a newborn. The digits grew in length until Juneau had fingers almost as long as mine. A grayish pink skin covered them, the same color as the skin on his stomach where the fur was thinner and easier to part. I held his hands in mine, the fingers curled around my palm, his thumb flexing in and out like the pinching motions of a crab.

They slapped at my hardwood floors as he walked.

And still I loved him. I told him this. And he would blink once.

One morning, I found him in the kitchen. His legs elongated, muscles swimming under skin like water moccasins in a placid lake. He stood upright, his hands, now longer than mine, had the upper drawer open. He held a jar of peanut butter in his hands, unsure of how to open it with these new appendages. I slid it from him, and he stared at me, those eyebrows lowered. It’s difficult to tell if a dog is happy with you when his mouth is closed, and his ears are up. I worried about this as he now met me at eye level. I opened the jar as he sat down on the floor, his now long legs bowing out like a cartoon frog. Hello, my darling. I scooped a wad of peanut butter onto my finger and held it out to him. He licked it gently off. He pushed his own newly formed fingers into the jar and held a mound of peanut butter out to me.

I locked my door that night. I listened as his hands hit against the floor on his walk down the dark hallway. He no longer scratched at the door or huffed out in frustration with his breath. Instead, you could hear his hands as they rubbed along the wood, feeling the door beneath their soft pads. The doorknob rattled; they must have found it. He turned it back and forth, testing it in his palms. 

I woke up that night with a hand on my shoulder, a cold nose against my ear. 

Juneau was gone in the morning, the bedroom door open. I heard him in the kitchen, a drawer closed, the sound of kibble pouring into a bowl. I called his name, once. I heard him stop pouring. The drawer closed, and the apartment was silent. I walked down the hallway; the kitchen light was on. One bowl sat on the small, square bistro table. It was filled with dry dog food. I sat on the other side, unsure of what he wanted me to do. He was standing on all fours awkwardly as his back legs were much longer than his arms. He stood acute, at an odd slant. Downward dog. 

He put one hand on the back of the empty chair, the other on the table, and he pulled himself up. His arched dog spine bent concave as he slid into the space. He sat across from me, and I could see myself trapped in his large pupils. He picked up one piece of kibble and pantomimed the action of eating it. The snout opened and closed with a sticking sound as his chops waved with the motion. He dropped it back in the bowl and pushed it toward me. 

I picked up one of the pieces and put it in my mouth. He watched. He listened to the crunch. The dry grittiness, the taste of bacon and tuna and oil, made me want to spit it out. But I didn’t. He opened his mouth at this, a smile. His hand reached toward me, and I pushed it away. He snapped his jaws once.

He reached toward me again, his fingers outstretched. A sound came from his body, I could hear it start somewhere deep within him and build as it climbed in his throat. A low guttural growl, a cough maybe. He tried again, another sound, this one a bark.

His fingers ran through the top of my head, scratched behind my ear.

He opened his mouth, a pink wet cavern with a dark hole in the center. Something white climbed from the depths of it, a small nub. More of them popped into place, like he swallowed a pookah necklace, and it was being pulled out shell by shell. They formed a small oval at the back of his throat, a row of small teeth, newly formed, pink, and slick with saliva and blood. A human mouth within his. It closed a few times, as if testing the density of itself. More quick barks came from its throat as the mouth within the snout formed its first word. 

His hands cupped my face. “Pet.”