Deborah Schamoni

Poodle Policy

“I am not neurotic – I'm anti neurotic” mouths the stranger as he waves his phone in my face displaying a supercut of him cradling his dog “Don't you think I look like him?”

The lights dim and he slides bis phone back into his pocket as I sit back into my cinema seat to watch a film about Lily-Rose Depp being admitted to a medical facility for people suffering with clinical lycanthropy. In a heartfelt scene she marks out her whiskers with the blunt end of a pencilled eyeliner.

I too feared turning. 

When the lights pull up, we leave for a subterranean bar hidden below Neubau. Inside the bell tolls not for him or I, but the lacquered couple slumped over the table. The man removing his wig and resting it on a stool while his partner lurches forward from the hips, legs kept upright from the stiff leather of her laced boots. I pretend I’m new here but truthfully this is where I have spent most of my evenings since moving to Vienna at the end of September. And truthfully, I am often publicly along, having jettisoned all of my friends – unpicking each contact by removing my sim card with a safety pin ripped from a clothes tag. Now, inaccessible I tell lies to the strangers I meet, small meaningless lies, lies for fun, lies to gain, lies which begin to submerge me.

Tonight, I sit and wait for action as my companion starts to ply me with more drinks and whispers baby voiced into my left ear, he can sense my “blurry widdle shadow,” In this light I tell him, I cannot see looking out onto a series of dark booths lit only by a solitary fluorescent hung over a small puddle patted by a patron’s slackened trainer.

“I came here to reinvent myself, don’t ruin it,” I snearl as I press my finger onto the strangers lips sealing them closed.

“That is des pudles kern! Isn’t it” he retorts pawing my hand away. 

I turn to him with a beaming smile and interject pointing at the couple now drunk on all fours and grin “you see it’s not just you or I”

The next morning alone in my room, I watch an unaired Dr Phil interview with a Florida frat boy who plagued by fears he had morphed into a half-dog, half-man mauled his neighbours to death.

On a video call to the talk show host the guest yelps “The way I see myself may or may not be different from the way other’s see me, but that I cannot help,”

Text: Lowe Poulter