Troy watched as RK and the woman walked out the front door, closing it behind them. She wanted to follow, but with the puppy pressed into her pelvis, she was stuck on her side with her rear legs locked in a partially spread position. Nonetheless, she tried raising a front paw, almost as though she could grab RK with it. But her attempt was cut short as another contraction wracked her body.
Just like before, every muscle in her stomach clenched down as hard as it could.
“Push! Push! Push!” came the instinctual thoughts that forced their way into Troy’s mind. Not having much else of a choice, she decided to listen to them and tried to add to the muscles that were already straining to push as hard as they could.
She felt her uterus clamp down on the puppies inside of it, squishing them all together and pressing them down into a second puppy, whose head was just starting to slip between Troy’s cervix. That puppy, in turn, was pressing down into the lead puppy, which was wedged firmly in the center of Troy’s birth canal, halfway into her pelvis.
Troy could feel everything straining. Everything pushing. Everything stretching. Or trying to. The lead puppy was firmly stuck. Despite the immense amount of pressure being placed on it, her birth canal was like a vice and, despite feeling like it was tearing itself apart, it refused to stretch.
Sophie’s memories of the last time she gave birth told Troy how useless this was. How she still had a long time to go. How everything would just slowly stretch out naturally, the puppies slowly descending until they came out. But Troy didn’t know what else to do. And more frustrating, Sophie’s sense of time wasn’t particularly refined. All Troy knew was that she still had a long time. So she pushed. And pushed.
And kept pushing until she felt all of her muscles suddenly relax. She felt the pain of the contraction go away, but the discomfort of the birth remained.
In her brief moment of relief, Troy took stock of Sophie’s situation – his… no, her new situation. Sophie was happy. She liked playing. She liked having sex. She didn’t like giving birth but she liked puppies. She liked being a dog.
What Sophie didn’t understand – but Troy did – was that Sophie wasn’t just a dog. Putting everything together wasn’t difficult. Sophie’s owner was a backyard breeder. Sophie was his purebred bitch. Her life was to be mated and give birth every few months. She would nurse the puppies until they could be sole, then she would do it all again. Eventually she would get old and die, and her owner would get a new bitch – maybe one of her puppies – and it would be like Sophie, like Troy, never existed.