Pacing

Jake has lived with these dogs for four years now. They pace around his cage on dry paws. He rotates as they pace, tracking their progress but never catching their eyes.
He learned this truth in the first few weeks: catch the eye of a hungry dog and it will bark. And not a yippie bark, but a rough angry thing that feels like a scraped knee somewhere inside your head. He doesn’t need that.
Meanwhile, there were these other guys, the ones pacing around the dogs, pacing around him. The dogs smell almost sweet — light-rain-sweet — but those other guys smell bad. One day, Jake asks them to shower.
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Sedates the dogs. Keeps them from barking so much. You know that.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot.”
“Hey, at least we don’t smell like Fish People,” one of them jokes. “Oh wait, you’d probably like that.”
“Ha ha.” Jake drifts back to the war, five long years ago. What had he been thinking, aligning himself with those Fish People? That was a huge mistake. And now here he was, paying the price.
Just a really gigantic mistake.