Urban Volcano

Fiction by Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

Flash fiction

Dog in the Soul

Other formats: PDF | íslenska

“What is it with you and dogs?” my friend asked as we sat in the glistering sun, drinking iced-coffee and looking over the square.

Dog in the Soul — Illustration by Börkur Sigurbjörnsson
Illustration by Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

“What do you mean?” I snapped back as the question had hit me off-guard and I had no clue where he was going with this.

“Did a dog bite you as a child?”

“No,” not that I could remember.

“Did you own a dearly loved dog that met its fate in a tragic accident?”

“No,” I would have remembered if that had been the case.

“Did you always want a dog but were never allowed to?”

“No,” but I did at some point long for a hamster.

“Then why do dogs always appear in such a negative light in your stories?”

“What? They do?”

In my mind I ran through the collection of short stories I had published a few weeks earlier. Dogs did indeed make an appearance in a few of the stories, but I could not see that they did so in a negative way.

“It’s like there’s a dog in your soul,” my friend declared after a short pause.

That was the weirdest psychoanalysis I had ever heard.

“I must say that I neither believe in a dog in a soul nor a soul in a dog.”

“Look! You did it again!”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind,” my friend sighed. “I would, however, if I were you, have this issue looked at by a specialist one day.”

Börkur is an avid storyteller with a keen eye for quirky characters, funny dialogs and vivid scenario descriptions. Much of his writing falls within the genre of realistic fiction and his stories are more often than not based on real events in the author’s life. Although the tales contain grains of truth, they are melded with fiction, making the reader curious to know the line between reality and fantasy.