Free Selection Event by Wayne Wightman

pushed her nose against the screen and it opened a crack. She could go out, if she wanted. This was different from the last time.
    She looked behind her at the living room and smelled its smells and then pushed the screen open and stepped down onto the front porch. After a brief survey from where she stood, she decided she would first look around where the man and woman used to take her.
    Wading through the weeds in the yard, she realized how different everything had become. From the front window, the yard looked much the same, but now standing in it, the weeds dragged across the hair on her chest and belly. She remembered how the man used to walk back and forth in the yard with the loud smelly machine and then the grass would smell strong and afterwards there would be less of it. But he had not been around to do that, and now the grass was tall and coarse.
    The edge of the asphalt street smelled less of tire smells than it used to, but lingering in the weeds at the edge of the street was the odor of the men who had been there that morning. She held her nose high in the air, and did not smell cars. Looking first one way and then the other down the street, she saw no cars moving. They were all quietly parked. So she crossed to the other side of the street.
    It was here, Isha remembered, behind the white picket fence, that Jojo lived. When Isha walked with the man or woman, the small white dog would charge the fence and snarl and snap and Isha would smell him and the smell of the house he carried with him, and then a woman would appear at the door and shriek, “Jojo! Jojo!” and the man or woman who walked Isha would be amused and Isha would look at the hysterical, outraged Jojo and think that there must be something wrong with him.
    Now she stood at Jojo's fence and waited, but Jojo wasn't there. He didn't suddenly appear and throw himself against the pickets. Isha barked twice, but still Jojo didn't appear. This had never happened before.
    Isha wanted to hear Jojo bark, so she trotted around into the adjoining yard where the breeze came from a different direction, and she smelled a smell that she knew was Jojo. Jojo's house had an open window and a white curtain blew back and forth, sometimes inside the house, sometimes outside, and that was where the smell came from.
    Isha backed up several steps, lowered and tensed her haunches, and leaped over the picket fence. Then, measuring the window's height as she walked back and forth looking up at it, she again positioned herself and leaped up, pushed her head through the curtains, brought her rear legs up and placed her back feet just outside her front paws — and dropped down inside Jojo's house.
    The smell was strong now — it was Jojo and something else. Cautiously, Isha moved from this room the kitchen, into the living room. On the sofa sprawled the woman with the high voice, except most of her face was not there and bugs moved on her, especially where her voice used to come from. Isha skirted the woman to avoid the bugs, still looking for Jojo.
    She found him in the bathroom. He was also dead, but his smell was stronger. Isha looked at him and remembered how when the man and woman had left the house, she had had to come to a room like this to drink. Perhaps Jojo had been here drinking and had got so hungry that he couldn't leave and then couldn't get up to drink. Isha remembered being that weak.
    She looked at him. Jojo wouldn't bark at her anymore. And perhaps the man and woman wouldn't walk her anymore. Isha passed back through the room where the woman sat being eaten by bugs. Isha had seen dead birds and dead mice being eaten by bugs, but never a human. Perhaps the man and woman wouldn't be back to walk her again because they were somewhere being eaten by bugs.
    Isha jumped back out the window and then over the picket fence and went to the street. Again she looked for cars, as she had been taught, and there were none... not even the distant noises of cars.
    Halfway