There were a lot of reasons I hardly slept in high school. One was perhaps that I lived my entire life in my bedroom, so had trouble differentiating the living part from the sleeping part. The other were the dogs.

Back in SouthWest Philadelphia, the dogs would bark all night. I think all of the neighbors to the left of my bedroom had at least one chained in their yard (though to the right they had chickens, and rabbits, in that order).

Between my canine-based insomnia and my general feared of sharp-toothed animals, I was less than thrilled to find that our new neighbors (to the right, this time) kept a pair of frightening pit-bull/Cerberus blends who had just had a cute-but-still-threatening puppy.

The growls are inhuman. Actually, un-canine. They sound like nothing I’ve ever heard out of a dog before. They are low, vibrating my window fixtures. They are the kind of noise I’d expect a dog to make when cornered by a larger animal. They are, in fact, the sort of growls I would expect a dog to make when encountering something with an unfamiliar and threatening scent. They are a growl from science fiction, and every time I heard it I half expect the roof of my house to be ripped back like the top of a can to reveal giant whirring saucers in the sky, beaming harsh red lights down on houses and trees and people, and they would all spontaneously burst into flame.

Except, I have looked out into the yard, and there is nothing in the yard but the dogs. Merrily drinking from a bucket, running in circles, and growling growls that should be preceding an alien invasion.