The months went by, and I basically got used to the feeling of not having a pet. In this year, life is hard, Quiksilver is already long-gone, and Shadow is very absent. It's still 2025, and things are still terrible, but in October my mother and I picked up a new four-legged friend. It looks like the cutie familiars don't end with Shadow after all.
This is Ziggy. She's a fat blue heeler that we adopted this year on October 1st, and since then she has seen a sharp increase of personal popularity. It's been more than 57 days. She's our favourite living dog now. Choosing or not choosing to bring in this dog would both be gambles, but I chose yes, and we won.
She was like that when we got her. Bent ear and remaining damaged-looking bod with extra fat reserves and all. We intend to make Ziggy thin again. We exercise her, control her food intake, and measure her all the time. She seems to have lost two kilograms of mass since the day we took her home. But as it currently stands, the feeding regimens of the previous owners have done a blow to her body, and until it's undone, seeing her will keep being incredibly funny. That's one of Ziggy's bottom lines. Shadow was extremely cute, but Ziggy is funny. I even frequently call her that, I say "hello funny dog" even though I don't exactly plan on doing it. I often also call her "funky dog".
I'm also very glad that when we returned to owning a dog, that dog was a blue heeler. I'd previously been told that mum wouldn't have a blue heeler again. This changed when mum was on The Internet and on some free dog directory saw a video of her. This was immediately met with admiration about how chonky she was. It's a major stroke of luck, blue heelers are easily my favourite type of dog. The whole breed is a fucking treasure.
We had a look at Ziggy in-person earlier than the day that we actually picked her up, at a visit which apparently did not include me bringing a camera, and a while after that it was October 1st which had been the day we planned to definitely make ourselves the sole owners of her. Here's another picture from that day of her traveling to her current home in the car.
We had wondered when she would finally bark. Shrill dog barks, for mum, were a serious issue. Ziggy was very quiet during our two visits to her temporary older house. Her main thing was to walk up to us, push into us, and get petted - right before walking away and going back under what at that point was her owners' house. We didn't witness her bark until we got to a petrol station. No issues there. It was a milder, less shrieking bark. Not high-pitched. Hearing her bark in October, we were kind of like "wow, that is actually pretty good". Mostly in late November I've not encountered barks, but weird cries.
From the day we put her in the car, she felt unreal when I looked at her. Like this dog was a breakage in the constructs of reality. I was in the back seat going home with her, and I kept thinking "I can't believe this is happening". After Shadow died, a moderately small hole appeared in the world, a hole that I somehow accidentally ignored was there. Then this huge fucking black merle porker comes along and is like "THUMP, fixed!" as she lands unneatly in the former leak spot, crammed onto a gap smaller than her.
It's taken a while to get used to her being here. I still sometimes feel like she's a warping of the universe when I look at her. I don't remember Shadow doing this. Why does Ziggy make my whole reality look like it's broken?
Having Shadow was like having a bedside lamp that flickered between dull enough to look directly at and being so bright it woke you up, but as long as you had two rechargeable AAA batteries the conditions could help you read a book whenever. The day we got Ziggy, a few months after the aforementioned day that Shadow died, she was like fate had gone against the process and shoved a weird D size battery into the lamp's AAA-recommended battery container. And then all the light that comes out of the electronics has UV black light rays and a glow of light that is visibly dark purple. And even though you're totally cool with this, it's weird.
I have a fun pastime of Ziggy's to mention, and that's the way she's viable to push us. She'll walk up to us, make contact, and then keep going into us. That happens fairly often, anyway. She also gets a little bitey. Funny, non-harmful bites. Especially if you look at a calendar and it doesn't say "November 28th".
Another thing Ziggy does is teleport when we can't see her. I'll have some conception of where she is and perhaps what direction she'll appear in to approach me from, and then instead she materializes out of a wrong, unexpected direction. I also have been really amused by seeing her through a window, calling her so that she gets up, and then watching her pathfind over to where I am. Actually it's a state of higher-feeling to watch her walk toward you, and I soak in that when I can. It's beautiful and exhilarating when you see the Here She Comes.
Ziggy also has a very wide, thick neck that I knew right off the bat would not be suitable for collars. At any walk of hers, a collar on her would come off quickly and make way for danger. She is the first dog I've ever had that I've witnessed requiring and using a harness.
Actually, she seems pretty clueless around roads and their dangers, probably because of her earlier farm life.
You might be wondering what Ziggy's name was before we got her. The original owners didn't call her that. Neither did the people we picked her up from. Her old name is - and I apologize for this - "Spaz". I guess calling her Spaz was fitting, but I knew I had to change it. I was not going to give her a name that titled her after her obesity, either. I didn't want her name to be a joke. This name "Ziggy" is derived mainly from the Pokemon Zigzagoon, National Pokedex number 263. She also has some subnames like "32" and "Format", many of which I rapidly forget after coming up with them. I think the majority of extra names I made are lost to the whims of memory loss now. The thing is, Ziggy really needed us. Ziggy has scars and a broken past. She may still be suffering just a tiny amount even now from the fallout. It's just the state of her body. She's adorable and totally non-horrific, but it's more than just fatness and her stray right eye. Not even her unstraightable left ear. She has a weird concave geometry part on her bottom side, the chest. Also she literally has a scar. Ziggy was not always fat, either. It turns out she was a pretty streamlined farm dog who helped with the farm work, went through too many pregnancies, got life-saving surgery, and at one point following that, stopped wanting to herd livestock. She also could have been shot if things happened differently, but the middle family - and I must stress that this family was not the original owner - stopped that. The middle family took "Spaz" away from the gun, and basically kept Ziggy warm for us for however many weeks until the people who were right for her came along. Hindbodes and his mum. I have to express a pillar of gratitude to the middle, temporary owners of Ziggy who didn't have time for her but got her out of harm's way and made it possible for Ziggy to come to us. The cost was completely free. The money is duly spent taking care of her.
One of my favourite things to do with Ziggy, tear-inducingly enough, is to see her from just the right angle, and then feel like I'm looking at Shadow. Sometimes she looks weirdly resemblant for that. Ziggy's asymmetrical in nearly every way so I have to look at her starboard side to do this.
Mum and I even talked about a theory that this dog could be somehow related to Shadow. Maybe one of Shadow's sisters went up some way and became Ziggy's mother. Of course if that is true, it would have profound implications for our understanding of Ziggy to find it out, and give Ziggy a major rise in how special she is to us.
Ziggy was lying under a house all the time before we found her, feeding off of scraps and bits of avocado. Her long and unkind approximately five-year past went on. Now we have her, and she is loved. Mum actually seems to act giddy around her a lot more than I do. Her outward expression of love for the dog certainly dwarfs mine. Which is not to say that I'd not be in pretty bad grief now if we didn't have her. I often forget that this dog is in my life and am positively surprised when I remember she's here, and I can go up to her for cuddles. I aim to keep Ziggy here, and try not to trouble myself with the temporality of a dog's life.
Ziggy is a funny to look at, adorable, big, meaty dog who came when we needed to be at peace about Shadow, and shreds a rift in The Universe just by sitting there. She is my dog, and it'll be a long time before I have to live petless again.