My Roommate is Gone and Left a Dog

My roommate’s gone.  That’s not the weird thing, sometimes she’s out with her boyfriend or out partying.  But today I came inside, and she wasn’t there.  This was odd because I had heard her talking on her phone before I came in.  She was speaking in German so I wasn’t sure what she was saying, but it was her voice and I could hear the voice of an older woman answering her.  I put the key in the lock and she was still talking, and then when I turned the key and opened the door, the voice was gone.

There’s a moment when your brain is hearing multiple noises where it gets confused.  I heard the mixed sound of the key turning in the lock and my roommate talking, and then the door unlocked and she wasn’t in the room when the door opened.

Maybe she was in another room, and I had heard her voice from that. I thought nothing of it for a while.  For a few days she wasn’t there.  Her salad grew more and more wilted in our fridge. 

Yesterday, I was talking to my RA, Thomas.  He was cooking some sort of danish food.  About an hour into his cooking while he was boiling noodles, I came into the kitchen behind him and asked if he’d seen my roommate in a while.  

Your roommate?” he’d said in an incredulous voice, turning around with his saucepan of bowtie noodles. 

“Yeah,” I said.  “Liesel.  You’ve seen her.” 

Thom still looked confused, so I continued.  “She has long light hair, glasses… freckles.  She’s German.”

“Oh.”  Thom turned back and dumped the noodles into the colander he’d put in the sink.  “I thought you lived alone.”

Thom was not the smartest person.  Well, he certainly wasn’t stupid, but he was bad at putting two and two together.  It was really a problem with his memory.  If I told him something, chances are he’d forget it in a week.  He had met my roommate- I’d see them talking in the kitchen sometimes or Thom would give her a fist bump if they passed.

“You’re my RA, how would you not know who my roommate is?”

Thom shifted the noodles in the colander back and forth.  “I have a lot of residents.  You’re not even on my hallway!”

If I could see Thom’s face, he would have been grinning.  “Well,” I said, “I’m worried.  I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“Why don’t you just text her?”

I crossed my arms.  “I have.  She hasn’t responded.”

Thom fished out the noodles and plated them, and then shook out some parmesan cheese to put on them.  Not very Danish, after all.  He had long fingers and his fingernails were bitten.  I watched his hands as he got out a fork from his cabinet.  “She’s probably okay,” he said lightly, and ushered me to go sit down with him.

I sat down, tapping my foot into the carpet.  “Yeah.  She’s probably just with her boyfriend.”

And that was all the help Thom was, which wasn’t very much help.  I’m not sure if an RA is supposed to do anything in times like this, but he didn’t do anything at all.

That interaction was only notable for the fact that Thom had forgotten about my roommate.  It’s not like everyone had forgotten about her or something, my friends remembered me complaining that she didn’t turn off the light at night sometimes, or that she would spend hours doing her nails and would fill the room with the smell of polish.

But Thom had seen her before.  Really, no one else had.

Oh, but the really strange thing is, the reason why I posted this, is that I found a dog under her bed.  She has those long hanging things, like curtains, over her bed, so that its hard to see under them.  This morning, I woke up early because I smelled something bad.  The smell was coming from under her bed, so I lifted up the curtains.  A dog was under there.  It wasn’t a really creepy dog or anything, just a mutt with short brown fur and a long nose.  It was alive but had been spraying the bed curtains, which accounted for the smell.  That was the only evidence that it had been there.  

The dog was staring at me with beady eyes and its long muzzle and I wanted to shut the curtains on it.  So I did, and I called the campus police. 

The police advised me to go to a kennel.  I don’t have a car, so that would be a problem.  However, when I opened the curtains back up, the dog was not a dog anymore.
There was a carving of a dog there.  The carving was in a way slick and sharp and soft.  There were indents where the eyes were and the tail hung as limp as wood could ever hang.

I called Thomas and he came over after about five minutes.  His hair was decently mussed up when I opened the door for him.  He must have just woken up.  “There’s a wooden dog under your roommate’s bed?”

“Yeah…”

Thom looked under the bed and took out the dog carving, which I felt must have diminished in size.  It fit in the palm of his hand.  “That’s weird,” he said vaguely.  “I didn’t know Liesel liked dogs.”

“Last time I checked you didn’t know Liesel.”

“Yeah…”

I took the dog from him and put it on my desk.

And that’s where it is at the time I’m writing this.  I don’t like the dog.  I should put it back under my roommate’s bed.  She’ll probably want it when she comes back.

But there’s something under her covers.  I can’t see it well in the dark, but there’s something in her bed.  Unmoving.