When they found the corpse it was not as expected. That is not to say it was a surprise. I had known Josh for a long time, since the third grade when he attached himself to my friend group and became a member through osmosis. He was a set-piece almost, an object without apparent function, but one who's absence was rarely noted yet always felt. I admired this ability as it set him against the scores of other social chameleons who through contrived style and persistent sycophancy insinuated themselves into their desired clique. Like a kitschy coffee table art book that no ones ever reads, Josh lived a charmed, hassle-free life. There were no real opinions about him and certainly no consensus, except for one thing. Josh was eminently murder-able.
It was not that Josh incited the latent bloodlust festering in our hearts. Rather, he was imbued with a profound aloofness like some clumsy species that evolved without fear of predation. He screamed extinction and we found ourselves the forlorn conservationists to his ungainly existence. So when news arrived that Josh's body had been found, our friends were proud that he had lasted as long as he did. However, we were deeply unsettled by the nature of his demise.
His blanched bones were found perched immaculately upon the toilet that he died, as if he sat in severe constipation more determined to pass a turd than foil his murderer. There was no flesh upon his body whatsoever and his skeleton retained the pose of his death despite the absence of any ligature. Without any blood or signs of an apparent struggle in the squalid hotel room, police initially thought Josh was a science classroom skeleton placed there by some high school goths. The dental records would eventually confirm that this skeleton was indeed Josh, but not before the investigators had posed with the body in lewd and unflattering ways. One detective even received a reprimand for posting a compromising photograph of the deceased on her Instagram in which Josh appeared to be doing a line of blow off her ass. His parents complained that cocaine does not look good in sepia.
Soon thereafter the detectives came to question my friends and me. They interrogated us bereaved with all the tact of a horny teenager first discovering a neighbor's porn stash. Grief was overcome by anger as the bumbling detectives groped their way to a number of possible conclusions, all of which were inconclusive and unsatisfying. One theory assumed our friend Lydia as the main suspect, citing a prior incident in which she had fucked her dead boyfriend. To this day she extols the virtues of rigamortis dick. Another hypothesis placed Josh at the center of a vast conspiracy involving the love child of Drake and Bette Midler. The official story, however, was that the incident was some sort of ritualistic murder carried out with fiendish exactitude by newly wed meth heads. Dissatisfied with both the process and conclusion of the investigation, several friends and I took it upon ourselves to find the truth.
Returning to the fatal locale, we happened upon a number of peculiar things. First, the room had an odoriferous miasma to it. The air was uncommonly thin and penetrating, as if the valence of the molecules held tiny penises instead of electrons and all those micro dicks were fucking our pores. Though rarefied, the atmosphere preserved a stench, some sweaty, suburban necrosis faint enough to pass as run of the mill motel stank. Second, Noah, our regular dungeon master who once created a Paris is Burning D&D campaign, discovered a sprig of pale fur. Identified by cops as belonging to the motel owner's cat, the hair seemed not at all feline, bearing an ethereal hoariness and almost abrasive coarseness. Confused, we sat upon the bed and made Lifetime style re-enactments of Josh's death. What could have kept him so still? Terror? Was he posing for a tasteless Vice article? Perhaps he had wanted to die all along?
As we brooded over his porcelain tomb, our theories began to grow more outlandish. Perhaps a dominatrix yeti was face-sitting on Josh and her caustic pussy had eroded him? Maybe he had been eviscerated by some futuristic ray gun? What if it was killer bees?! We were all terrified by killer bees. All this conjecturing unnerved us and the lack of a significant thesis darkened our hearts. Noah began to smoke and talk as if he were some grizzled detective ruined by an unsolved case. He mumbled about his ex-wife and his daughter who wouldn't return his calls. Noah was 17 and a virgin. Lydia seemed to be in a trance and droned that she saw the entire history of the motel room laid out before her. Laughing she described in lurid detail an aborted three way between Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, and Macaulay Culkin's sentient pinkie ring. Feeling woozy and overwhelmed myself, I ushered my friends out of the hotel room and back to our respective homes.
That night I dreamed of Josh or rather many Joshes. He visited me as each female cast member of Twin Peaks. Laura Palmer Josh swung from a chandelier, Audrey Horn Josh prostrated before me with an empty roll of toilet paper, and Shelly Johnson Josh asked me to interpret text messages from a boy she met last night at a bar. I awoke to the flatulent unity of my mouth and asshole gasping for air. Immediately, I got dressed and went to Josh's house to look for more clues. Scouring his room, I found much to disturb me. There were some photos of the Spice Girls in which he photoshoped himself as the sixth member (alternately Institutional Racism Spice or Soda Stream Spice). The stand out creepiest, however, was a collection of hand-made clay figurines all shaped like tiny dogs. They were poorly crafted, but for their buttholes which had meticulous detail. A regular canine anal menagerie. Along with his journal, I took one of the figurines for evidence.
Together Noah, Lydia, Eric, and I poured over Josh's journal. A terse and laborious read edited as if it were meant to be submitted to Thought Catalog, Josh's journal conveyed a manic obsession with small dogs. Shifting from panegyric to twitter promotion, Josh heralded these tiny hounds as savior and humbled himself before them. We were disgusted to read and reread his fantasy of being carted around in a purse by a giant, bitchy chihuahua in pink heels. Despite the fetishistic revelry of the majority of its entries, Josh's journal occasionally belied a sense of bewilderment and dread. The entries became more and more chaotic toward the end, especially when referencing a hirsute "white man" with "ivory hair and black eyes". For Eric this confirmed the yeti dominatrix thesis. For the rest of us, however, it was another disconcerting element to a man we were only now finding out we hardly knew.
His journal made oblique mention of a place in the woods where "the dogs would dance" and it was there we directed our search. Outfitted with excessive quantities of trail mix and not an overabundance of Xanax, we waded into the slash pine forest with Josh's journal as our guide. We moved quickly like roadies fleeing a Taylor Swift mega tour. Around dusk we seemingly found the area indicated by the journal. It was not much. A shack even by hobo standards but ensconced within a series of concentric circles. Warily we approached and entered the shack. Within was a ring of couches all facing inward to a tiny dog bed at the center. Disarmed by the comfy setting, my companions and I began to loaf on the couches and munch on trail mix. We guessed as to the nature of this oddly ritualistic place. Lydia assumed it was a stoner hideout, noting that the couches were arranged in such a way as to facilitate bong passing. Ever incredulous, Eric developed the yeti dominatrix thesis further, positing that "dominatrices gotta chill too, bro." Noah withdrew into himself.
Finding no answers, we agreed to leave the place where "the dogs would dance." As we packed the remainder of our things, Noah exhorted us to listen. A soft yipping crept through the forest and into the shack. We sat and waited as the barking grew louder. Then, as if driven by the barking, the smell at the hotel began to fill the shack, though this time far more acrid. Noah, who was by far the most uneasy among us, began to insist that we leave. When we refused he stormed out. I pleaded with him and watched him fumble away like a recently awakened coma victim on a obstacle course. Returning to the couch, Lydia dolled out some Xanax to calm our nerves. Within minutes, however, Noah returned bleary eyed and gushing with more snot than all the preschoolers in Texas. He was raving. He claimed to have heard post 2000 No Doubt jams in the forest. He swore he saw the white man. Adding to the tension, Eric noted that it would be just like a hirsute white dude to listen to No Doubt.
As Eric rifled through the journal in the hopes of finding more information, I stared out the dingy window of the shack. In the distance I saw him, the white man. His pallid fur covered every inch of his face and hands. He wore a white suit, white pants, and a white belt to the side. Leaning up against a tree one might have mistaken him for a geriatric metal-core scenester. Terrified, I locked the shack door and demanded everyone pick up a blunt object. Huddled together on a couch facing the door and holding giant bags of trail mix, we awaited Josh's murderer. The barking had reached its peak along with the reek of putrefaction; the shack door began to shake. Then, all of the sudden, it stopped. The quiet rattle of a swinging door filled the room and in trotted a tiny white dog. The dog sauntered to the middle of the room and plopped down on the dog bed.
We sighed collectively and put down our weapons, all relieved near to the point of orgasm, beside Eric who made a comment about disliking tiny dogs. I walked over to the little pup which titled its head at me and licked the air. Its breath smelled vaguely of the miasma in the hotel but far less acute. Strangely assured I sat down on the nearest couch as my friends crowded around the fluffy intruder. I leaned back and breathed deeply, but with each breath I felt a mounting pain in my chest and deep ringing in my ear. I shook my head violently and awoke at the scene of Josh's murder. The air was asphyxiating in its rarity and choked with its stench. I felt weak and delirious. We were all sitting on the that same foul motel bed that would surely have looked like a Jackson Pollock of bodily fluid under black light. The scene was similar to how we had left it, except the dog was there. A wan and scruffy Eric petted the beast with a skeletal hand. He smiled and cooed as the dog slowly consumed him. I screamed, but my friends did not hear me.
I tried to stand up to escape the motel. My legs gave way and I fell. I awoke back in the hut, my friends still gathered around the dog. "This..." I said, "this...". I had forgotten what I meant to say. Lydia told me I looked tired and should lie down on one of the many couches. I agreed. We had been walking all day to get here. I lied down and felt a cool, wet breeze slither across my forehead.
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