I was, sometime later, vaguely aware – through a dreamlike haze – of the low drone of a van, which must have been part of some forgotten dream. There was the illusion of movement, a lifting and dropping sensation, probably my stomach turning in nausea at the anesthetic, rather than actual locomotion.

When my eyes opened again, I found myself standing up in an upright box of some kind. For a brief moment I thought I was in an upright coffin, and my heart hammered. But it was just a box; no velvety lining or curved lid. There were a grid of tiny holes running along the top, enough to let air and some pinpricks of light. Otherwise, I couldn’t see much at all. I couldn’t even see my own body.

To my surprise, drool was running down my chin. My lips felt floppy and my tongue hung long out of my mouth and I couldn't get it back inside, like dental surgery gone wrong. They must have operated on my mouth, I thought angrily. That dental chair wasn’t just a stylistic choice! And then I grew worried; had something gone wrong with the procedure? Why was I in this dark, enclosed space? Well, at least I wasn’t cold, wrapped up as I was in a fuzzy blanket. Post-operative was considerate like that, if not entirely comfortable.

As my thoughts became more lucid, my mind turned to getting out of the enclosure I found myself in.

"Hello?!" I shouted.

"Oh!" a woman's voice came from outside. Only, it sounded familiar. I scrunched my eyebrows. No...it couldn't be...How…?

"Stacy?" I called out. "Is that you?"

"I can hear you!" she called back.

"Where am I? It's dark, I can't really see anything."

"Hold on, little guy," she said. "I'm coming. I'm getting you out now."

I frowned. 'Little guy?' She knew it was me…right?

I heard footsteps approaching. There was the sound of something being shuffled around over my head, and then light spilled onto me, in from a square hole at the top of the box. Before I could react, a huge pair of gigantic hands emerged in the light above my head. I only just noticed the familiar shade of flamingo red coating the huge fingernails before the hands swooped down onto me and capably encircled my chest. I yelled in fright as they lifted me up into the air under my armpits.

I found myself suspended in the air, and facing right in front of a giant. The ground – a beige carpet – was tens of metres below me. I was in some huge expanse room that looked like a living room, the walls far receded.

And right before my eyes, looking down at me, this giant person. But not just anyone.

It was Stacy. And she was enormous. She was multi-storey-building tall. Her head alone was almost my total height, she could have covered the front of my torso with her palm, and her fingers encircled my ribcage with ease. Her mammaries – resting right in front of my face – were like a shelf that could’ve together supported my entire weight.

I was roughly the size of a puppy.

This wasn’t possible.

A high-pitched whine was coming from my mouth without me even helping it. I was kicking my legs and struggling.

“No, no no!” Stacy cooed at me. “Don’t be afraid of me. I’m not going to hurt you.” 

There was a beat as her eyes dropped.

“Oh…!” she said in an odd voice. 

Judging by where her eyes were looking, I was hit by a pang of horror, thinking I must have lost control of my bladder. In fact there was an imminent loss of control looming. But it was worse.

My bulge was pointing out stiffly between my legs. And boy did it look strange now – Brian junior, what happened to you? I nearly yelped. The glowing red tip of Brian junior was now sheathed in a white furry ruffle. How festive.

“You’re really happy to be out of that box, aren’t you?” Stacy said. Happy, excited, terrified, inappropriately amorous -- what did it matter when all those different feelings equally caused my heart to skip around like there was a baby rabbit trapped in my chest.

It didn’t help that Stacy was making no effort to hide her candid stare. And why would she? What a confronting thought. I was no longer ‘me’ – or not the ‘me’ I had been the last time I could remember. That was becoming clearer and clearer. I had a strong suspicion I was no longer quite human – she was certainly not looking at me with the reservation of someone looking at another person. She had the unguarded, unconditional expressiveness of someone interacting with a small animal. And that suggested, for me, now, the words ‘naked,’ ‘modesty,’ and ‘decent,’ might as well have been obliterated from application here – obliterated from my life dictionary altogether.

She bent and placed me gently down on the carpet. This was when I was able to get a good look at myself in the light, and see more for myself of what kind of beast I had been turned into.

The first thing; there was no furry white coat. I was naked. When I thought I had been wrapped in a furry blanket, I was only half right. My bare skin was covered in silvery white fur. I ran a hand through it, wondrously afraid, and found my palm and fingerprints were covered in soft, dark pads, and ended in little black claws. Thankfully, my hands weren’t full paws, they were still hands. I could move my fingers and thumb, and grasp things. But without looking closely it wasn’t hard to be deceived.

More bizarrely, a long furry tail erupted from the base of my spine – actually my spine continuing on past my lower back, out of my body – a weird realization. And in my heightened excited, terrified state, it was flicking back and forth wildly, outside of my control, and giving the mistaken impression of joy – which was the last thing I felt.

And what did my face look like? I wondered with dread. Judging by how my tongue was drooping out from my mouth, I didn’t really want to know. I could feel extra length in my ears that I’d never been aware of before. That was not a good sign. I reached up and felt an ear that was a little wider than remembered, and extended above my head, ending in a point. It also felt like a tuft of hair was growing out of it – that definitely wasn’t there before. I could also swivel them around more than I used to be able to, a novel skill that refined my hearing, but of absolutely no help in the circumstances.

Also, a bunch of different smells assaulted my nose; the pine of the freshly cut, small Christmas tree standing behind me, the chemical tang of insecticide around the windows, the meat that had recently been baking, a flowery aroma to scent up the house – maybe lavender or something – and, the strongest scent of all; the fruity spice of Stacy’s perfume, doing a pretty good job concealing the musk of natural body scent – but that, too, my sensitive nose picked up.

Because my sense of smell was highly acute; I could not only identify subtle smells but locate them with accuracy – there was no way I should have been able to pick any of that up, to such a fine degree. It should have been fascinating, but was actually disorienting. Every time I blocked out one smell, another replaced it. There were smells everywhere, wafting out of every corner. I could’ve driven myself mad investigating them all.

Watching me looking around, Stacy slid to her knees down in front on me.

“Yeah,” she said, “I guess this is your new home.”

I stared up at her.

“What? I have my own home.”

“Do you like it?”

“I can’t live here! You know that!”

“What do you think of me? – do you think we’ll be good friends?”

No!” I spluttered. “I made that clear last time we spoke!”

Then one of her enormous hands swept out and gently pushed me onto the ground. Before I could get to my feet again, she rolled me onto my back and began tickling my front.

“Stacy!” I grunted, thrashing around. “Stacy, listen to me! —just give me a second to let me work out what’s going on!”

“You’re such a talkative little thing, aren’t you?” she smiled down at me.

She couldn’t understand a word I was saying, I thought with despair. I must have sounded like I was making yowls and grunts, in other words, normal dog sounds.

“This is crazy,” she chuckled – you’re telling me, I thought bitterly – “I haven’t played with a dog for so long…”

“I’m not a dog!” I yelled, pushing and kicking at her hands, trying in vain to roll away, but I was still clumsy and uncoordinated from the anesthesia.

“But then, you’re not a dog…”

My eyes went wide. I stopped struggling.

“Yes, I’m not! That’s right!”

“…You’re something else, aren’t you? They made you specially for me with dog DNA. And human DNA. Should that be a little creepy? – That’s what it said in the pamphlet. That’s why you have little people legs, and – ” she pinched one of my thighs, “ – such big, intelligent, expressive eyes. But if that’s what’s keeping you from making me sneeze like crazy right now – and, you know, not like, go into a coma and die – then I’m okay with it.”

“What?” I said. How could it get worse? “You’re not cured? You were supposed to get an injection – not this massive freak-up!”

I could rant and scream all I wanted; she didn’t understand. From her point of view, I was just yipping excitedly. It didn’t help that my tail was still whipping back and forth like a little rotor, like it had a life of its own. She wasn’t even talking to me, I reminded myself. She was just talking out loud, more or less babyspeaking at me, saying whatever came to mind.

“Good thing you can’t talk,” she muttered above me as her bright glazed fingernails raked through my chest hair, “That would be just a little too creepy.”

Then she glanced at me briefly, serious. “That’s right, isn’t it? – you can’t talk? You have such an odd little bark. Almost like you’re trying to say something.”

“Ruff ruff,” I said miserably.

She giggled. “Of course not.”

Her hand withdrew then, and she lifted an information booklet in front of her face and flipped through the pages.

“Wow,” she said in an undertone. “It’s Brian’s DNA. He volunteered for it to be used…” she paused thoughtfully for a moment. “I don’t know how to feel about that…” She looked up, touched. “Oh, he shouldn’t have.”

“You don’t think I realize that now?!” I said, lying on the ground limply.

Stacy had taken out her phone and was keying something in.

“Okay, don’t race ahead of yourself, girl,” she muttered to herself. “This is still weird territory.”

Understatement of the year, I thought.

She held the phone to her ear for a long time, listening. It didn’t sound like the recipient was picking up.

“Come on, Brian…” she mumbled.

Wait, I thought, she was calling me? Well, of course I wasn’t going to pick up. I was right here in front of her. But then, where was my phone?

I almost wondered if I should be expecting Dr Ikeda to pick up, but of course he wouldn’t be stupid. If he had any brains at all he would have destroyed the evidence of this sordid experiment in an industrial grade furnace. My phone was probably in some dumpster behind the medical apartment, ready to rumble off in a dumptruck to landfill the next working day.

Finally, she hung up and lowered the phone, pursing her lips in mild frustration. I couldn’t help but wonder what she had planned to say. ‘Thank you for the dog’ – or something more? What did it matter now? To think that she might have changed her mind about me now only threatened to sow the wound with salt. She might just be amenable to dating me, and now I was in no state to enjoy it. Worst Christmas ever.

Putting her hands on her knees, she looked down at me eagerly.

“I got a name for you, puppy,” she said with a big smile. “What do you think of ‘Saint’?”

“I’m Brian,” I uttered in defeat.

“I had a dog a long time ago,” she went on wistfully, “called ‘God’ – funny name, I know. He was supposed to be called ‘Dog’, but I wrote it backwards on his registration. I was like, only three years old when we got him. I guess the allergy hadn’t triggered when I was that young, or something. I wanted to name you in honor of him. And it’s appropriate, seeing as it’s Christmas…”

Lifting me into her lap, she began to tell me about some story about God, some funny things he’d done as a puppy. God was the dog who’d been eventually taken away when her late-onset allergies kicked in.

The story poured out of her like a busted dam, as if the sight and feel of me unlocked a reserve of half- forgotten memories. Meanwhile, her hands ruffled my pelt in constant unconscious motions. I squirmed restlessly between her fingers and tried to creep away along the carpet but couldn’t get very far away before she would predictably scoop me up and return me to her lap, never letting me get further than an arm’s reach away. I didn’t feel very comfortable sitting still on her lap – I was still coming to terms with the fact that she was big enough to constitute a landscape to me; a ground that I could walk on, though a shifting one with its own intentions.

And she acted on her intentions without a moment’s forewarning. Whenever one of her hands passed over me to pat my head, I was apt to flinch. Her hands – particularly if her fingers were outstretched, seemed each large enough to knock my head off – maybe an exaggeration – but in my state of heightened anxiety anything seemed possible. She lifted me, shifted me about, and rolled me over like I weighed nothing.

At some point her account dwindled away. Then I heard her sniff and when I looked up again, her eyes were wet with tears. She caught my staring.

“I’m okay, puppy,” she muttered, pulling me up towards her chest in a hug. My face was practically pushed against her breasts and I could feel her heart pulsating against my cheek.

But it was was difficult to feel too turned on by this when I could her sniffling above me, and feel the occasional drop of a tear spotting onto the top of my head. I knew a little too intimately why she was crying, and my body went slack and I sighed. I felt like my chest had deflated like a balloon. I had hoped she would enjoy my gift. But this wasn’t just enjoyment, this was psychotherapy. This was almost a low grade childhood trauma, and now it was being cleansed and released. How could I hope to renege on this? It would be the loss of ‘God’ all over again.

But then, what about my mental needs? Sure, I’d caused this, but this was not the gift I’d intended. A living breathing little dog (or dog man, if you will) is a very different thing from a cold, inanimate, faintly sinister-looking syringe. And it was more than a dog. It was me. I couldn’t give her myself, and particularly not without my own consent. No one (Even Dr Ikeda, crazy or no) could seriously expect me to live like this. And for how long? The rest of my life? What had Dr Ikeda said; a dog was for life?  This was a serious breach of my own human rights.

But human rights were for humans. Did they even apply to me anymore?

Stacy bent her head and buried her nose into the back of my neck. She took a deep breath as if trying to inhale as much of my scent as possible. Her breath warmed my scalp.

“You smell so good, puppy,” she sighed, her lips massaging against my neck as she spoke, her breath fanning through my fur.

In fact, the scent of fruity soap had tailed me right out of the gift box, and now I realized the medical clinic must have sprayed me with some fragrance before packing me in.

“And I just can’t keep my hands off you,” she said, rustling her hands through my fur for the 1000th time. She had stopped crying. “You’re sooo cute and soft.”

She turned me around in her arms and started playing a game of trying to plant a kiss on my wet nose before I could pull my head away. Her glossy pink puckering lips expanded right before my eyes as they ventured for contact with my little black nose, but as my nose was so comparatively small, her lips often got much more of my face than intended.

A couple of times my eyelids ended up scrunched up under the pressure of the forceful twin plush lips, and my own slightly floppy black lips got snared by a wet smack, and then, with a small wet squish, released and withdrew. My heart raced with the notion that Stacy was kissing me on the lips (accidentally or not) – but tempered with the frustration my form disallowed any romantic reciprocation! This was almost worse than no kissing at all!

And it wasn’t consistently pleasant. What should normally have been nice was rendered intimidating by my tiny size. Having her enormous head dip right into my facial zone created a little of the panic of a plane flying too close overhead. An instinctual sense that human faces just didn’t normally zoom in that close unless you knew the person well – and particularly not as big as this one. I didn’t feel like I was getting kissed so much as being assaulted. My little furry legs licked pointlessly in mid-air, while my chest was captured by her powerful hands. My tail wagged stupidly, as if totally disconnected from my brain. Or maybe my tail was connected more closely to my subconscious than I’d liked to admit.

I found myself wondering how I ever possibly got myself in a position where I was actually trying to resist getting kissed by her. But here I was. Strange world.

All the tactile stimulation and struggling around soon wore me out – and I wasn’t exactly 100% full of energy in the first place, seeing as I was still wearing off the anesthetic. After finally managing to slither out of her clutches, I climbed up onto a nearby sofa and curled up to go to sleep. At least I didn’t need a blanket; my fur more than adequately kept me warm.

“You must be so tired after your trip,” Stacy said, crawling over to me and scratching my cheek gently. Then she stood and let me rest.

I slept for a long time. At times I woke up briefly to hear Stacy in another part of the house. Then it sounded like she had gone out in the car for a little while. Then she returned and put the TV on.

Finally, she came and found me again. I stretched and started to get up.

“Look what I got…” she said, taking a seat on the sofa beside me. Compared to my negligible weight, the cushion sunk down under her, and caused me to stumble over into her thigh.

“Oops, sorry little puppy,” she giggled “excuse me and my big butt.”

Sweeping a hand under me, she pulled me up onto her lap. The ease and comfort with which she did this was unsettling, fitting me into her hands like I was a favorite glove. She was holding something in her other hand. I looked on with dread. It was a little purple collar with diamond sequins. A little feminine for my taste. Then again, as a dog, the only taste I was expected to have was for bones.

Keeping me still with one hand, she secured the collar around my neck. I reached back for the latch but trying to open it with claws and puffy finger pads, rather than delicate fingerprints, was like trying to pick a tiny lock wearing novelty size clown gloves.

“Very handsome,” she said admiringly down at me. “And it’s not just fashionable. It’s got a practical purpose, as well.”

She held what looked like a handheld tape measure, but instead of extending out tape, there was a dog leash. It was one of those retractable leashes.

Oh no.