Celebrating Dog Days

In the early nineties, I was teaching at Harvard and fortunate enough to find myself directing a senior honors thesis that required less of me than any job I had ever held before or since. Each week, a shy young woman would show up at my office with a story or two, and I would devour them and greedily ask if she could please just keep doing what she was doing and bring me more.

This young woman was Judy Budnitz. I met her right after I began my five-year stint at Harvard. She was a sophomore at the time, and even then she was turning in some of the best work I had ever seen in an undergraduate writing workshop. She wrote beautifully, had a natural gift for finding the shape and arc of a story, and a vision of the world like none I had ever encountered. In one story, a girl with a leprosy-like condition flaked away into nothingness. In another, a girl fell from the sky. A mother tried to guilt her son into literally giving her his heart. An old man told how children were once created: rolled out, shaped, and baked like a loaf of bread. Her stories were so vividly unique and yet, at their hearts, bound to human emotion and circumstance as old as Moses.

Judy was a star; she was wholly original, and her talent was apparent to all. Still, at that time, she was best known for the cartoons she drew for Harvard’s newspaper, the Lampoon, and soon my office was decorated with many of these—Lorena Bobbitt wielding a big knife, a surgeon sheepishly holding up the wrong organ. Dark situations that, I daresay, Charles Addams would have wished he’d thought of first. Her eye for ironic detail and her wry—often macabre—sense of humor fed both her drawing and her writing in a way that was nothing short of brilliant.

Her senior year, Judy’s honors thesis became her first published book, a short story collection called Flying Leap; in a separate honors thesis in animation, she made a beautiful little film based on one of the stories. When asked to write about a story I wanted to shine a light on for Ecotone, I was torn between “Hershel” (the lovely story I mentioned earlier about how children were created, and the subject of the film) and “Dog Days.” “Hershel” is a kind of Yiddish folk tale that explains why children are no longer baked into life as they once were. As in so much of her work, there is the subtext of a much darker story—in this case, the Holocaust, although the story never makes that reference directly. Though I recommend all of Judy’s stories, ultimately I chose “Dog Days” because I have had such success with it in the classroom.

“Dog Days” takes place in the wake of some terrible thing that has happened to end civilization as we know it. It was written twenty years ago, and in the two decades since, I have seen many, many apocalyptic stories from students, as well as in books and movies. In fact, I have seen them so often that, as with zombies and vampires, I have sometimes begged students in my classes for a moratorium on these beaten-to-death tales. And yet I would say now, as I did twenty years ago, that “Dog Days” is such a fresh spin on something done and redone that it still would rise to the top among pieces with the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it premise. Added to that, the story was written at a time when very little of this nature had been done in literature, and I felt its impact even more for that reason.

My first thought on reading “Dog Days” was how original it is, and how Rod Serling would have pounced on it. As an avid Twilight Zone fan, I was often amazed by the imagination and insight that went into the best episodes; Serling...