#31: Procession by Paddy O'Reilly: guest post by Bronwyn Mehan

Available in: Going Down Swinging No. 30

Author website: Paddy O Reilly

Images from Paddy O’Reilly’s Procession have stayed with me since I first read it over a month ago in Going Down Swinging No. 30. So when Laurie invited me to stick a story I’d been chewing onto his Gum wall, the choice was easy.

The Story

Procession begins when the narrator takes her five-year-old daughter, Sienna to see the spectacle of dogs walking on their hind legs and talking. This is a world in which only children and a very few adults are able to understand what dogs are saying, while the rest look on with horror. ‘That was the moment I knew everything had changed,’ the narrator says.  ‘Not the hind leg walking but a dog gazing at me as if we were equals.’

In this new world, dogs that were once compliant workers or mild-natured pets have rebelled. There is intimidation and fear amongst the human population. And there is recrimination. ‘We never had a dog,’ says her angry neighbour. ‘It’s cunts like you that bought this is on.’

The story shifts to ten years later. Sienna is now a member of the Dogteens, a Hitler youth-style organisation run by dogs bent on recruiting the young to its canine cult. The narrator tries to intervene, washing the smelly collection of pelts Sienna has taken to wearing. But Sienna not only wants to smell like a dog, ‘she doesn’t want to be reminded she is human.’

‘Can’t you get her to take a shower?’ says the narrator’s husband, as if it’s his wife’s responsibility, his wife’s fault. He is still doing this as he watches his daughter take her triumphal place in the sinister show of dog pride that is the pack master procession.

Why it sticks

Procession works very cleverly as both speculative fiction, in which dogs are in the ascendancy, and as an allegory about parenting. ‘She’s a teenager, I told myself the night I heard her grunting and barking in the backyard with the boy who looks like a dingo.’ Aside perhaps from the barking, this could be any parent commenting on their teenage daughter’s sexuality. And like many parents, these two squabble over child rearing, accusing each other of not doing or caring enough and praying that the rebellious phase will simply pass.

Paddy O’Reilly’s Procession is a chillingly imaginative, darkly comic and beautifully crafted tale.

Bronwyn  Mehan lives in Darwin. Her short fiction has been published in Southerly, Meanjin,  Sleepers Almanac and page seventeen. She blogs at http://bronwynmehan.wordpress.com