Twinkles popped the trunk with her paw, and poochies piled out like spring-loaded snakes from a gag peanut can. The five bitches in heat were hopping out of their car to catch a summery drive-in screening of Bad Element, a movie about drug-smuggling canines in Bangkok. They were panting from being trapped in the trunk, but luckily none suffered heat stroke. The humidity was excruciating. Fireflies blinked across the parking lot. Twinkles liked lightning bugs because she was named after them. As the designated driver, she punctured a water bottle with her teeth and squirted it into a steel bowl she’d set beside the car, so her buddies could lap it up.

“Drink,” she barked.

Twinkles snuck them all in for the price of one. The female dogs had agreed on Twinkle’s lawn before leaving that buying six movie tickets for some dogs to score was moronic.

The drive-in was the only one left in the region, and had been taken over by canines in the 80s. They showed schlocky dog re-runs and barksploitation films. Growling, barking, biting, and bottle hurling were typical. This wasn’t a human drive-in where people stay in their cars to make-out, tease each other with Red Vines, or give hand jobs. Dogs prefer fresh air and star gazing—once their cars are parked they cruise the lot.

On good nights, the drive-in showed hardcore porn. Dogs drooled while boning car tires, popcorn containers, or speaker poles. Dog porn is more underground than snuff. It isn’t limited to dog-on-dog; it involves sex with inanimate objects, other animals, even human legs. The innocent, voyeuristic stuff involves dog humping or butt sniffing in parks surrounded by gawking owners. From there, dog porn denigrates into activity that induces human vomiting.

Tonight, the opening scene showed a dealer and his client humping behind a dumpster. Dogs in the lot went at it immediately. After only five minutes, the howls were louder than the movie’s boingy Thai soundtrack. Barking came over the loudspeaker and spotlights came on.

“Quiet!”

From the car’s hood, Twinkles beheld a sea of copulation.

“Show the porn!” a dog in the distance yapped.

“Porn! Porn! Porn!” another group chanted.

“Shut up!” someone in the distance growled, followed by the sound of a breaking beer bottle.

Scenes of drug-dealing dogs riding bikes through Bangkok’s back alleys commenced. The lot’s atmosphere was tense, as dogs awaited lurid sex scenes. Twinkles secretly hoped for a riot. Bad Element referred to the impossible love developing between the scrappy mutt drug dealer and his highbred clients.

Twinkles’ pack was impeccable. She was a shapely, adolescent whippet who ran track with her owner every morning. Blossom was a slap happy, two-year old Airedale who loved chasing rabbits and napping under sycamore trees. Emma was a six-year old Shar-Pei with velvety folds of skin, and was especially well socialized for her aloof breed. Homeboy, the sexy beagle mix, was incorrectly named but her owners were too lazy to think of something more feminine. Homeboy was a little aggressive, in a good way. Paradise was a chubby dalmation with a black nose and black spots around each eye. She was elegant and voluptuous, like a masquerade ball attendee.

The gang had organized via Internet, through a personal ads section labeled HORN DOGS. This section’s heading is typed so small that humans surfing never click on it. HORN DOGS attracts males, females, gay, straight, trannies, drug-addicts, DL dogs (who keep it on the downlow) and bored suburban dogs, or BSD. Twinkles advertised as a Bored Dog out For Fun, BDFF, a clever twist on BFF, a term she’d heard human girls use for Best Friends Forever. She and her BDFFs lived in the same neighborhood, a half-hour’s drive from the drive-in. She’d snuck her owner’s Oldsmobile out to chauffer.

There is always the chance that if a HORN DOGS listing reads BDFF CUM C PORN W/ ME that it’s a code for I AM A SKEEZE but Twinkles had been on a good luck streak with this on-line dog friend business. Twinkles, Blossom, Emma, Homeboy, and Paradise had first formed their pack two months ago, to visit the Dingo XXX for a food fetish film, Soft Treats 6. In this series, dogs don’t eat the snack. They toss, bite, squish, or gnaw it for close-ups. All five bitches scored that night.

The pack sat in the sedan while Twinkles manned the hood. None of them had picked up sexy scent trails yet. Twinkles yawned as the drug dealer on-screen got another client hooked, and her tail wagged like windshield wipers on the front window, blocking the other dogs’ views.

“Sitting isn’t getting you anywhere,” she barked at her friends.

“I’ll break your tail,” Paradise barked, “if you don’t stop wagging.”

“A little harsh, don’t you think?” Emma asked Paradise. “Give Twinkles a goddamn break. We wouldn’t even be here.”

Paradise snarled, but went back to watching the film.

Emma unfurled her tongue down into the bag of popcorn to catch kernels. Each time the others tried to steal some, she showed her teeth. Paradise was sick of Emma’s hoarding, and set off to get her own popcorn bucket.

Trotting back from the snack stand, gumming a tray of nachos like a newborn puppy, her plump body swayed back and forth.

“Look at that cute, chubby dog,” some jerk barked.

Years of midnight pantry raids showed. She’d reared a litter years ago as well. Paradise’s teats drooped like baby bottle nipples.

“Go home fat bitch!” another rude dog growled.

Tears welled in Paradise’s masked eyes. When she returned, she dropped the popcorn bucket and started to sob. Emma chomped up a few bites of the spilled snack, but the rest of the gang sniffed Paradise and licked her salty, wet cheeks.

“Who said that?” Homeboy asked. “I’ll bite their ass.”

“Fuck that chubby dog shit,” Emma said after inhaling popcorn vacuum cleaner-style.

Blossom didn’t want to fight but she’d go along with whatever.
Twinkles told the pack to hunt the lot and bring the bastards back alive.

Blossom, Emma, and Homeboy combed the perimeter, looking for the assholes who insulted their voluptuous friend. Blossom located a hole in the back fence and the trio got sidetracked exiting the drive-in to explore the pond in the distance where they heard bullfrogs croaking in bushy stands of cattail.

“Look!” Blossom barked when she found a frog.

Emma ran up and gulped it.

“Don’t eat that,” Homeboy barked.

It was too late. Emma frothed at the mouth and pawed her chops. She drank a gallon of pond water, rolled in muck, and chewed water lilies. Lilies soothe, but the frog’s cheek pouches had already expelled their white, milky toxins all through Emma’s mouth.

“I’ll never eat frog again,” she whimpered.

“You’ll just eat everything else,” Homeboy said, referring to the hogged popcorn.

“Let’s bring a frog back for the attack,” Blossom said. Homeboy found an empty two-liter soda bottle, chewed the top off, and caught a frog inside, to carry around as their weapon.

Emma was on the rampage now that her jaw ached. She hunted ruthlessly for dogs barking derogatory statements at bitches. Some guys howled, and some called bitches come-on names but Emma was listening for more serious barks, extended comments that stung deeper than her amphibian mistake. Paradise stuck up for her once, back during the Soft Treats screening. A sleazoid behind Emma had been humping her chair, and before the dog made his final crude ejaculation, Paradise whipped around and bit his neck. Of course, the bitches loved male horndogs, but in another fundamental way, they banded together against them when the dog lipstick idea became the opposite of erotic. Not even the horniest bitches want sires spewing on them behind their backs.

A dog with a deep voice across the parking lot scowled, “You hairy bitch! I wouldn’t hump you if you were the last dog on earth.”

Emma, Blossom, and Homeboy charged over there, noticing that he was directly en route the snack stand where Paradise would have been innocently returning with her nachos.

“You have a problem with chubby dogs?” Homeboy barked. The girls surrounded him.

He was a rottweiler mix, buff but diminished by some terrier genes that made him seem more intellectual, like his bark was bigger than his bite.

“I like my bitches lean and mean,” he said, humping air as if pumping a lean, mean imaginary bitch.

“How about me?” barked Emma. “I’m lean.”

“Wrinkly,” howled the dog. “Like you soaked in the bath too long.”
“Me?” barked Blossom.

“Your hair looks like it got stuck in a curling iron,” the dog barked. His dog pack gathered around and howled in unison.

“What about me?” barked Homeboy.

“You’re so short,” said the dog. “You might get rolled under my car tire.”

The bitches bought time until Twinkles and Paradise arrived, who used scent to locate the action.

“You don’t like anyone, do you?” Twinkles barked as she sauntered up.

“Now you,” the dog drooled, “I could get with!” Twinkles and the pack howled with laughter.

“Dream on,” Twinkles said. “The only thing you’re going to get is a headache.”

Blossom released the frog, and the bitches watched it hop from dog to dog. The male dog gang retreated, afraid of its bloated cheek pouches. The rottie picked it up in his jaw, planning to hurl it away from his pack. In the process, the frog’s pouches exploded and rude boy got a sour flavor blast. His pack scattered, and he doubled over, pawing his face. That’s when Paradise moved in to tie his hind legs together with some rope they’d found in the car trunk. The five bitches dragged him back to their Oldsmobile, after stuffing the frog back in his mouth to shut him up.

On screen, drug lords were brutally beating the drug dealer who stole money so he could buy his wife and kids a new television set. Off screen, the rottie was hog-tied in the back seat of Twinkles’ car, and the bitches took turns snapping at him. He wasn’t hurt, just insulted.

“What should we do with him?” Blossom barked. If they let him go his pack would be after them.

“Teach him a lesson!” Homeboy barked.

“Listen, ladies,” Twinkles barked. “We came here for sex. Doesn’t anyone want to show him what getting humped feels like?” The dogs stared at her blankly.

Paradise, who had never bit another dog in her life, piped up.

“”Here’s chubby,” she growled. And she bit his ear off.

The other dogs gasped, and the rottie howled in pain. Blood trickled down the side of his face. On screen, blackbirds pecked at the drug dealer, poking him until he cringed behind a dumpster. Twinkles watched the vicious birds, then looked at Paradise spit the ear out onto the parking lot floor, feeling a violated sense of freedom. When she bent over and smelled it, it reminded her of the pig’s ears she often relished. She wished she were at home in her bed, chewing rawhide in front of the box fan.

The pack untied the intruder, and he ran for his life, stumbling through the lot as if he’d lost a paw instead. His brown, triangular ear lay limply next to their steel water bowl.

“What should we do with it?” Blossom asked, in shock.

“What the fuck, Paradise?” Emma barked.

“I’m not touching it,” Homeboy barked.

Paradise stared at it, then lapped up some water. “I’ll bury it by the pond.” She pawed the ear into the same two-liter soda bottle that they’d imported the frog in, and carried it outside the fence, to the cattails. She flipped it out of the bottle, covered it with mud, put a gravestone on it, and whimpered for a few minutes, as if burying a pup.

Twinkles’ gang doesn’t go to the drive-in anymore, and they voted Paradise out. Paradise lost a lot of weight, and the last time Homeboy ran into her while on a walk with her owner, she told the girls, Paradise’s skin was saggy and she looked dull gray instead of black and white. Emma suspected that the reason Paradise lost her spots was because she snuck over to the pond, unearthed the ear, and munched it.

“Why would she do that?” Twinkles asked, as they all lied around on the backyard lawn one afternoon.

“Maybe knowing it was there was torture,” Blossom said. “I’d rather destroy it then think of it rotting in mud.”

The dogs wagged tails in agreement.

A flock of crows flew overhead, and Twinkles flinched. She got up, went over to the water bowl for a sip and walked into the house. The birds were listening. In place of black wings, Twinkles saw flapping rottweiler ears, coasting on air currents to support dirty little dogs cruising down from the heavens.