Full Immersion

"There's something honest about a creature who feels no remorse whatsoever. At least you always know where you stand."

The sliding door scraped against its track as I hauled Millie inside, her claws scrabbling for purchase on the carpet as she resisted every step. The smell coming off her coat was intensifying in the warmth of the house — that thick, organic rot mixing with something sweeter and more putrid underneath. My eyes watered.

Charles was sprawled across the couch, the television casting flickering blue light across the room. Some American show — explosions, canned laughter, the synthetic urgency of entertainment designed to fill silence rather than create meaning. He looked up as we passed, registered Millie's state, and wrinkled his nose.

"What did she roll in?"

"Something dead."

"Gross." He turned back to the television, clearly deciding this was not his problem. Fair enough. It wasn't.

I dragged Millie down the hallway toward the bathroom, her body low and reluctant, her legs bracing against the tiles whenever she found traction. The collar dug into my palm as she pulled back, and my injured arm throbbed with each resistant step.

The bathroom door stuck slightly as I shouldered it open — the wood had swelled with winter moisture, a recurring issue nobody had gotten around to fixing. I fumbled for the light switch with my elbow, and the fluorescent tube flickered twice before committing to full brightness. The sudden illumination revealed the familiar space in unflattering detail: the slightly yellowed grout between tiles, the water stains on the ceiling from some long-ago leak, the collection of half-empty bottles clustered on the shelf above the sink.

I released Millie's collar and she immediately tried to bolt for the door. I caught her with my foot — gently, just enough to block her escape route — and she sat down with an expression of resigned disgust.

"Don't even think about it," I said, testing the water temperature with my good hand. Too hot. I adjusted the tap, waited, tested again. Lukewarm now, which would have to do. Dogs didn't like extremes.

The tub was an old enamel thing, deep-sided and heavy, the kind they didn't make anymore. It had been here when my parents bought the house, and it would probably be here long after we were gone. The plug chain rattled as I stoppered the drain and let a few inches of water collect — enough to work with, not enough to frighten her.

Millie watched these preparations with growing alarm, her body tensing as she recognised the signs of what was coming. Her ears flattened. Her tail tucked. She pressed herself against the bathroom door as though hoping it might spontaneously open and grant her freedom.

"Come on," I said, reaching for her. "Let's get this over with."

She went rigid as I lifted her, all four legs stiffening in protest, her body becoming an awkward collection of angles that refused to cooperate with the simple act of being carried. The movement pulled at my injured arm — a sharp reminder that I was doing this one-handed when I really shouldn't be doing it at all — and I had to adjust my grip twice before I could lower her into the tub.

The moment her paws touched water, she scrambled.

Claws scraped against enamel with a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. Water sloshed over the rim, soaking immediately into my socks. She lunged for the edge, got her front paws over, and I had to press gently on her hindquarters to keep her from vaulting out entirely.

"Millie. Stay."

She did not stay. She twisted, writhed, attempted a manoeuvre that might have worked if she'd been half her size and twice as agile. More water hit the floor. The bath mat was already saturated, a sodden island in a spreading sea.

I kept one hand on her back — my injured arm, because I needed my good hand free to work — and felt the ache deepen into something more insistent. The bandage was going to get wet. Stephen had said to keep it dry. Stephen wasn't here, and Millie wasn't going to wash herself.

"Just... hold still. Please."

She stopped struggling, but only because she'd exhausted her initial burst of resistance. Her body remained tense beneath my palm, muscles coiled for the next escape attempt, eyes fixed on the bathroom door with desperate longing.

I reached for the plastic jug we kept under the sink — easier for the initial wetting, less frightening for her. The handle was cracked from some previous bath-time incident, but it still held water. I filled it from the tap and poured slowly over her back, watching the liquid darken as it soaked through her fur.

She shuddered at the contact, a full-body tremor of displeasure, but she didn't bolt. Progress.

The water ran brown almost immediately. Whatever she'd rolled in had worked itself deep into her coat, and the smell intensified as the moisture released it — that thick, organic rot that caught in the back of the throat and refused to let go. I breathed through my mouth and kept pouring, working the water through her fur with my fingers, feeling the grit and matter that had accumulated during her adventure.

"What even was it?" I muttered, more to myself than to her. "A bird? A mouse? Something that's been dead for weeks?"

Millie offered no explanation. She simply endured, her head hanging low, her eyes half-closed in an expression of profound martyrdom.

The shampoo bottle was on the shelf above the tub — lavender-scented, designed for dogs, purchased for circumstances exactly like this. I had to stretch to reach it, and the movement sent a fresh pulse of pain through my forearm. The wound was definitely making itself known now, a steady throb that competed with the ache in my shoulders from the awkward positioning.

I squeezed a generous measure into my palm. The lavender was sharp and artificial, nothing like actual flowers, but it was better than what was currently emanating from Millie's coat. I worked the shampoo through her fur with both hands — I needed both hands for this, whatever my arm thought about the matter — starting at her neck and moving backward along her spine.

The lather turned grey almost immediately. Then brown. Then something closer to black as I reached the areas where she'd concentrated her rolling. I could feel the texture of whatever she'd found — granular, sticky, deeply embedded in the undercoat. This was going to take more than one wash.

Millie stood motionless through the shampooing, apparently having accepted her fate. Her ears drooped. Her tail hung limp. The suds built up around her like foam on a shoreline, and I worked methodically through each section of her body — sides, belly, legs, the delicate area around her face where she'd clearly pressed her muzzle directly into the source of the smell.

"You really committed to this, didn't you," I said. "Full immersion. No half measures."

She turned her head slightly, just enough to fix me with one baleful eye. The look conveyed something beyond simple canine displeasure — a kind of dignified accusation, as though I were the one who had transgressed some unspoken agreement about the proper treatment of dogs.

The television erupted in another burst of canned laughter from the living room, the sound filtering through the walls with tinny persistence. I could picture Charles out there, oblivious to the small drama unfolding in the bathroom, absorbed in whatever manufactured entertainment was filling his Friday evening. We'd been close once — or as close as brothers four years apart could be. These days we mostly orbited each other, sharing space without quite sharing lives.

I rinsed the first round of shampoo with the jug, watching the grey water swirl toward the drain. The smell had diminished but not disappeared — still there beneath the lavender, stubborn and insistent. I was going to have to do this again.

"Round two," I said, reaching for the bottle.

Millie's ears flattened further, if that was possible.

The second shampooing was more thorough than the first. I worked the lather deeper, paying attention to the areas I'd rushed through before — the folds of skin around her neck, the feathering on her legs, the base of her tail where dogs always seemed to accumulate the worst of whatever they'd encountered. My arm was screaming now, a steady burn that ran from wrist to elbow, but I kept going. Stopping meant starting again, and starting again meant prolonging everyone's misery.

The bathroom had filled with steam — not from hot water, but from the simple accumulation of moisture in an enclosed space. It clung to the mirror, the tiles, the small window above the bath that nobody ever opened. The air was thick with lavender and wet dog and the fading remnants of decomposition, a combination that would probably linger in the grout for days.

I refilled the jug from the tap, the water running lukewarm now as the hot faded. This was going to take longer than I wanted — jug by jug, working the lather out of her coat while the evening stretched on around us.

Millie stood motionless as I poured, her head hanging low, her body accepting each cascade of water with the stoic endurance of a creature who had given up hope of escape. The grey lather ran down her sides and swirled toward the drain, carrying the last remnants of whatever she'd found behind the compost bin.

Jug after jug. Fill, pour, watch the water run clearer each time. Fill again. Pour again. My shoulder ached from the repetitive reaching, my socks had passed from damp to saturated, and the bathroom floor was becoming a small lake that would need mopping before Mum saw it.

The lather was running clear now, the water draining without the grey tinge that had marked the earlier rinses. I worked carefully along her sides, her belly, the difficult spaces between her legs where soap always seemed to accumulate — angling the jug to reach the awkward places, my movements slow and deliberate.

The smell had finally faded to something manageable. Not gone entirely — I suspected it would take days to fully dissipate — but no longer the aggressive assault it had been when I'd first dragged her away from the compost bin. Progress. Small victories.

I set the jug aside and turned off the tap. The sudden silence was almost startling — no more rushing water, just the drip of residual moisture and the distant murmur of Charles's television. Millie stood in the tub, waterlogged and bedraggled, her fur plastered to her body in a way that made her look half her usual size.

She was shivering slightly. The water had been lukewarm, but the bathroom had cooled as the evening deepened outside, and wet fur provided no insulation.

I reached for the towel on the rack — one of the good ones, a thick navy bath sheet. I should have grabbed one of the older towels, the ones relegated to dog-drying and car-washing and other tasks deemed beneath the dignity of proper linens. Too late now. Millie was cold and I was soaked and the good towel was what my hand had found.

The fabric was soft and heavy as I shook it open, and Millie watched the movement with wary attention. She knew this part of the routine — the bundling, the rubbing, the vigorous attention to ears and paws and all the places where water liked to hide. She didn't like it, exactly, but she tolerated it better than the bath itself.

I draped the towel over her back and began working it through her fur, absorbing the worst of the moisture. She leaned into the pressure slightly — the first sign of anything approaching cooperation since I'd dragged her in here — and I took that as permission to continue.

The rubbing was rhythmic, almost meditative. Towel against fur, fur against skin, the repetitive motion of hands doing simple work. I could feel her warmth beneath the damp coat, her heartbeat steady against my palm when I pressed the towel to her chest. She was calmer now. We both were.

"You've got no idea how lucky you are," I said quietly, working the towel behind her ears. "You roll in something dead, you get a spa day. I forget to put my socks in the wash and it's a full interrogation."

She turned her head and licked the underside of my chin. Twice. Quick, warm, the particular gesture she reserved for moments when some unspoken understanding had passed between us.

Then she shook.

The violence of it was absolute — her whole body rotating, ears flapping, water spraying in a perfect radial pattern that covered the mirror, the walls, the ceiling, my face. I'd been expecting it, had braced for it, and still I ended up sputtering as droplets hit my eyes, my mouth, the inside of my ear.

"Seriously?"

My voice echoed off the tiles, and behind us the bath made its final draining complaint — that guttural gurgle it always produced, like a ship sinking reluctantly into the sea.

Millie sat back in the empty tub, her fur sticking up in damp spikes, her expression transformed from martyred victim to something approaching smugness. She'd made me as wet as she was. Balance had been restored.

I wiped my face with the corner of the towel and looked down at her. She looked back, unrepentant, her dark eyes bright in the fluorescent light.

"We're not done yet," I said, reaching for the towel again.

She huffed once — not quite a bark, not quite a sigh — and waited.