Living With the Black Dog

Today's the day: Issue #2 of Be Not Afraid, my horror comic with the brilliant Lisandro Estherren, is on stands today.

Critics have called it "a rare blend of horror and heartache" and "a genuine masterclass in horror storytelling." Friends have told me to "stop reading reviews," but I "won't," because I'm "insecure."

Head out to your local comic store to pick it up, and make sure to reserve the next issue before next Monday, July 21.

The first time Donald Trump was President, I had a newborn, and I’m pretty sure that’s what saved me. The needs of a newborn are immediate, simple, and overwhelming: She needs changing. She needs feeding. She needs a hat before she goes outside, a bath, someone to stand over her while she lies on the changing table and rub her belly, so that she isn’t gassy, so that her nervous system will start to come online, and make connections, and know she’s loved. 

In all of that present, immediate needing, there is very little time to let your mind wander. You can’t sit in front of your computer scrolling social media and freaking out — even if you do get time to yourself, somewhere in there, you’re too tired to use it that way. Your life shrinks down into pleasures that are very nearly as simple as the baby’s: Getting that one cup of coffee while it’s still hot. Watching bad TV for an hour. Napping. 

The world came apart, while I was drinking my one cup of coffee, and I knew that, but I didn’t have time to focus on it. Someone small and infinitely well-meaning needed me, and as long as I had that axis to revolve around, I was okay. 

My daughter is eight years old now. She needs a lot of things, but I am not always one of them. In November of this year, I became convinced that we needed to adopt a dog. 

Nobody thought we would adopt another dog. Especially not me. Our last dog, a Boston terrier named Peggy, had died in her sleep that summer. She was ancient and warty and largely immobile, and she developed weird Cronenbergian fat deposits that ballooned out of her abdomen but were (the vet assured us) totally normal, and she did not like anybody, anybody in the world, except for my husband, whom she loved so much that — to this day — if you suggest Peggy wasn’t particularly friendly, he will look at you with big, wounded eyes, and say “Peggy???? Peggy was fine.” 

Peggy was a child of God much like yourself perhaps, and I do not judge her. But Peggy refused to walk on a leash, or learn tricks, or accept food, or be petted, or (increasingly) so much as move off her spot on the couch for anyone but my husband, who was so committed to the general concept of Peggy that he got her face tattooed on his arm. The woman who designed the tattoo also hates me, because I had a falling-out with her husband, so now, every time he wears a tank top, I receive a silent rebuke from them both. 

I was as surprised as anyone when dog fever hit me. But all of a sudden, there I was, Googling breeds and scrolling Petfinder and pelting my husband with adoptable dog profiles and just generally not at all examining the psychological underpinnings of my sudden drive to bring home a second, more permanent toddler. My previous toddler was now old enough to get excited about a new puppy, which helped. 

“We could get a dog that likes me,” she told my husband. “Peggy didn’t really like me much.” 

“Peggy was fine,” my husband said. 

He made me promise to do all the walks and all the feeding and buy all the pet food and pay for the boarding and the vet and, if necessary, move into my own small shack in the backyard with just a laptop and the dog ("your dog"), and in January, we wound up at a rescue that had five dogs who were supposed to be good with children, including two puppies. 

I have a second-grader. Realistically, there was no way I was going home without one of the puppies. Still, I tried. 

When they let the puppies in — half-Boxer, half-Lab, they told us, although who knows — one of them went to play with my daughter, as expected. The other one walked up to me where I was kneeling on the floor, burrowed into my coat, and hid there, curled up on my lap. I petted him a little, then stood up and moved, so he could interact with the rest of the family. 

He walked over to me, burrowed into my coat, and hid on my lap again. He just kept doing it, every time I moved. My daughter reminds me that I had brought treats to introduce myself to the dogs, and that I had been carrying them in my coat on the ride over. But the treats weren’t on me, at the time, and he could have gone over to someone else to get them. 

It was just a feeling I hadn’t had in a long time: Something small, and infinitely well-meaning, needing me. I signed the papers and took him home. 

What can I say? Donut was — is — a tremendous dog. In his first few months with us, he ate an entire chaise lounge. Specifically, he first ate a woven rug, picking it apart one shred of fabric at a time, and when we got rid of the rug out of concern for his safety, he turned his eye to the chaise lounge and dismantled it, bite by bite, as revenge. 

So he ate the chaise lounge. He ate Joan Didion’s We Tell Stories In Order to Live, and some large, glossy books on art, and multiple DVDs, two of which were John Wick. He ate two computer chargers, three remote controls, and the cord of a mini-fridge, which thankfully was not plugged in at the time. He ate every shoe anybody owned, and any toy my daughter left on the floor for more than three seconds. If there was nothing on the floor, and he was bored, he ate the walls. 

If we exercised him enough, I knew, he would stop eating things. But Donut didn’t like to go for walks; the sidewalk scared him. Everything scared him. He was scared of vacuums, and the mailman, and guests, and other dogs. He was scared of public parks, and stray cats, and traffic noises, and toys that squeaked. He was scared of construction, and tractors, and babies (especially babies!) and the deer who sometimes walk through our yard at twilight. The first time the deer came through the yard was Donut’s personal 9/11. The second, third, and fourth times were also his personal 9/11. He lives in a universe where 9/11 just keeps happening, which is why he’s scared. 

My daughter, meanwhile, was scared of Donut. It turns out that the one thing Donut cannot tolerate is being separated from his people by a distance greater than about three inches; he needs physical contact, all day, every day, to be sure that we’re real. So he liked my daughter, but he announced that he liked her by bounding across the room and pinning her beneath himself, at which point my daughter would flip face-down and scream until she was rescued. 

In this way, the first six months of 2025 passed. My husband said the phrase “your dog” more and more, with increasingly lethal emphasis. My daughter — now convinced that she was living through the plot of Grizzly Man, with me as the delusional Timothy Treadwell drawing her ever closer toward her doom — started hinting darkly that things would have been different with the other puppy. 

As for me, I was happy. Who wants to watch a crisis unfold in the news, when you can make your own crisis right there in your living room? Who wants to fail at saving the world, when you can fail to save one chair? 

Then, one day, without any particular change taking place, Donut was our dog, and we loved him. He went for long walks with me every morning. He spent his days chilling under my desk, gnawing on toys that would not kill him. I stopped having to replace computer chargers. My husband laid next to him on the carpet, exclaiming “he’s such a well-behaved dog,” and praising his many notable qualities. My daughter could pick him up and lug him around by his armpits, or put her fingers in his mouth, or wipe her hands on him while cooing that he was her “dirty little napkin baby,” and he would just sit there and gaze at her with beatific devotion. She shouldn’t do those things, but she does them, and he doesn’t mind. 

He’s still Donut. He’s still scared of everything. Last week, on his walk, he and I turned a corner to behold a woman with a baby, petting two cats, while another dog was being walked up the sidewalk toward us. He had to lie down on the grass of someone else’s lawn for a while to process the horrors he had just seen. But he doesn’t bark, or growl, or attack anybody; he just sits down, and waits for the threat to pass, and sometimes whimpers. I kneel down next to him on the sidewalk and he stops whimpering. I don’t mind doing it. This is how we met. 

So I’m not sure whether he got used to us, or whether we got used to him. But at some point, Donut stopped being a crisis, and became himself: A sweet, intelligent, unusually sensitive and gentle dog who was kind of a lot when he was a puppy. 

In the absence of self-manufactured crisis, the various crises of the real world started leaking in. I started reading headlines and — worse — having feelings and opinions about the headlines as I read them. I became aware that it was, actually, vaguely crazy that I was working so hard not to have any feelings this year; that it was not an actionable plan to just bring home a baby or a puppy every time history took a dark turn. Sooner or later, the dogs and the babies grow up, and become easier to handle. History stays hard, and history is always here.

Donut is a black dog. They’re traditionally a sign of ill omen. Black dogs were sacrificed to Hecate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft and ghosts, because she liked them. In England, the appearance of a massive black dog — the Black Shuck — is said to bring down lightning storms and foretell death; in Scotland, the Devil takes the form of a black dog to preside at witches’ sabbaths. Depression is sometimes called “the black dog.” To this day, shelter workers say that black dogs are adopted less often, though they don’t know whether it’s an association with cosmic evil, or just the fact that black animals photograph less well, so you can’t brag about them on Instagram. 

This is one of the times I really regret the limitations of human-dog communication, because I'll never be able to tell him: Donut — the dog who wouldn’t cross the street for a full day because the neighbors left a stroller on the lawn and he was afraid a rogue baby might be on the loose — is someone else’s idea of a terrifying monster. Donut, the dog who’s afraid of everything, is the shape of fear. 

I can feel myself reaching for a cute, essayistic conclusion here — something about how the destructive force rampaging through all our lives, devouring everything we love, is just anxiety, or something like that. It’s not true. The destructive force rampaging through our lives is destruction. The anxiety is its predictable effect. 

But I think many of the people reading this newsletter will have been cast as monsters, in someone else’s re-telling of the world; we know what it’s like to be the image that provokes fear in others, when most of the time, we are afraid. 

What I can tell you is that living with Donut has forced me to be more patient with fear. His way of dealing with his anxiety might look crazy or destructive to me, but it all makes sense to him, because the world is large and he is just one animal. He doesn't understand everything that is happening and has very little ability to control it, and most of the time, whether I like to admit it or not, I am in basically the same position. This dog crawled into my coat, and asked me to reassure him, and I agreed to do it. What I suspect, though I cannot prove it, is that he saw I needed something to worry about, other than myself; maybe the dog (my dog) was trying to reassure me. 

Dogs are all over the place, really.

Once again: Unlike my dog (who is afraid) my comic instructs you to Be Not Afraid. Issue #2 is out today, and FOC for Issue #3 is next Monday, July 21. I hope you pick it up.