The Kid I Babysat Drew The Dog Man Six Months Before I Saw It

I babysat for a family down the lane through my last two years of school. The girl was four and drew constantly, and most of it was the usual: horses with too many legs, a house, a sun in the corner.

Then she started drawing what she called "the tall dog that stands like Dad".

It was always in the same place on the page — right side, at the edge, half off the paper, which I now think is the most frightening formal choice I have ever seen a child make. It had a long face, and it stood upright, and the back legs bent the wrong way.

I asked her where she saw it. She said, "In the field where the horses aren't."

There is a field on the school road where there are no horses, because the fencing is bad. I want to be fair: a four-year-old walks past that field twice a day, and children draw monsters, and her father is a big man who does the thing where he lopes about being a dog to make her scream with laughter. It is all explainable. All of it.

Six months later I was walking home on that road at about half seven in the evening in February, which is full dark.

Something stood up in the field where the horses aren't.

Not "I saw a shape". It stood up. It had been on four legs, low, and it rose, and it kept rising, and the rising is the part that my body has never let go of, because there was more of it than there should have been, twice.

I ran. I ran the whole mile and I was sick on my own doorstep and my mother thought I had been drinking.

I have never gone back down that road on foot. I am twenty-nine. I drive a long way round and I have made my peace with the extra fuel.

The girl is fifteen now. I ran into her at a bus stop last year and, God help me, I asked. Casual. Do you remember your drawings?

She looked at me for a second too long and said, "The one that stands up?" and then her bus came, and she got on it, and she did not wave.