The dog was a yapper. It was also nocturnal. I didn't know anything about the owner except that she was a woman. At night, after having tossed and turned for an hour to fall asleep in the first place, the dog would start it's little high pitched squeek that would be cute if it were a novelty. I knew that the owner was a woman because it apparently kept her up also and at three in the morning, prime conversation time for her pet, I would hear her in the apartment next to mine shuffle around and beg in a whining way – a way that gave far too much power to her animal – to please go back to sleep. Sometimes it would work. Sometimes her pet would bark until five when it would then get sleepy from the work and fall asleep. I could only imagine how it looked, it's little legs curled beneath its long body that formed a perfect circle from tail to snout.

I saw it in the street once, about a month after I moved in. Its keeper was nowhere to be seen, but it didn't seem to care. It sat perched on the stoop, four steps up, wagging its tail and yapping at any stranger with the audacity to come within a ten-foot radius of its post. I was carrying a small bag of groceries that I'd picked up at the deli on the corner and found myself amused by how brave the small animal acted.

As I climbed the steps the yelping became like a digital alarm clock beeping over and over and over again. Thinking that by petting the thing I might hit its snooze button, I bent down and reached for the spot behind the ears that all dogs love. There was no growl, no warning, not even an ear twitch the second before it leapt at my hand an inch above its head and snapped at my outstretched fingers. The aggressive little rat drew blood but that didn't satisfy the hellhound. As I backed away, setting my groceries on the step, to look at the damage to my hand, the thing decided to add insult to injury by tearing the bag of Arborio rice I'd purchased open all over the sidewalk and urinating on it as if to prove a point.

It wasn't that my hand was hurt especially badly or anything the dog decided to destroy that was in the bag was especially pricey, it was the moral of the thing. I didn't know who was its master, and I didn't know what training methods were used to keep it in line, but I was going to make sure that it never came near me again. I ran over to the animal which, at that very same moment decided that it wasn't the tough dog it thought it was prior but instead a weak specialty animal for the rich, tucked its tail between its little legs and galloped into the entryway yelping as though I'd given it the sound beating it deserved.

Growing up I'd had several dogs. My dad was one of those people who believed that a fine dog was the only true companion for a man and had done his very best to instill the same feeling into his children. My dad's dogs were big dogs. He always wanted a purebred animal but the closest he every got was to a couple of half breeds that were different combinations of Labrador, Newfoundland, German Shepard, and another who's name I could never remember. They were huge and when I was little my dad used to tie my wagon to a harness he'd worked up in his garage that he would put on his dogs for that very purpose. The memories of his canines were fond ones, but none of that transcended the feelings I had for the neighbors'.

I was so furious after my encounter with it that I had to put a name to my enemy. In a set of encyclopedias – the 1967 edition – that I'd picked up in college for twenty bucks, I learned about that-which-drove-me-mad. The dog was of the Dachshund breed and the rat of the dog world, bred to ferret groundhogs from the earth and to kill most other rodents. It was known for having a bitch of a demeanor, was supposed to be the hardest to train, and then, only for the patient. My neighbor must have picked it out because it was so cute.

The humiliation had sown a seed of hate inside of me. At home, every creak I heard was the rat dog's fault. The late nights with it barking out the window to its early morning friends didn't help my inclination towards it any. By the end of the first year of the two year lease I'd signed on faith that the apartment was perfect, I had reams of paper with hand drawn plans who's only purpose was the destruction of the Dachshund. One of the more extravagant plans called for the extermination of the entire breed. The thought was that if one gone made for a better world, then all of them gone would equate something close to perfection.

During summer I spent the majority of my weekend daylight hours in a lawn chair of plastic strips strung across an aluminum frame that I'd purchased at K-Mart for ten dollars and placed on the roof for maximum sun exposure. It was a peaceful place to read and sleep so long as I applied copious amounts of lotion prior settling down for the day. I wasn't the only tenant that used it as my private tanning salon so I didn't even look up from my book when I heard the door creak open and closed on hinges experienced with too many humid summers. I was surprised when I felt a wetness being applied to my feet with a steady beat. Laying on my stomach and reading the novel I'd been struggling with for too long, I'd failed to notice that it was the devil dog that had decided to join me on the roof.

The thing must have known my plans because as I slowly sat up, and calmly started for its neck, it again urinated on something of mine. This time it was my chair and I watched in horror as it calmly created a little puddle under the aluminum leg and watched with interest as it turned to a small river that eventually ran to where I'd set down the novel in order to strangle the dog. Once satisfied by what it had caused, the rat made its way towards the door in a happy little trot.

It wasn't that it smiled – I knew enough about animals that of all house pets it was only the cat that had the muscles to achieve what we thought of as a smile – but the way it panted, it's tongue lolling outside of its mouth, dripping drool so as to mark its path in bodily fluids, mouth pulled back so as to show its tiny teeth that would be truly ineffective against a large animal, I felt something primal. The chimpanzee in me that never seemed to leave the jungles of Africa no matter what continent I was on told me that there was really only one way to deal with the thing. Suddenly I realized that the drawings and plans made over the last year weren't mine, that they were written in the chimp's hand. I was the animal in the Jane Goodall National Geographic video that played with a bat in my hand until it no longer amused me and I would bite off its head.

It wasn't me that leapt out if my chair and dove at the dog with both hands outstretched above my head to capture it. It wasn't me that put that look of total and complete fear in the hound's stupid eyes, that made it yelp not in mock fear of perhaps having gone too far as I'd seen on the stoop a year before but with the terror of an animal that knew it's day was done. It was me who shook the frightened pet and tossed it into the air. The chimp was a very playful part of me. It knew that I wanted the dog punished as bad as it did and let me have my play with it before it resumed control.

I watched the dog, it's tiny legs running in mid air as though it would find traction and fly on it's own force of will. It's back twisted so that, as it started to fall back towards me, its hind legs were on their side and it would have been an almost noble pose had it been on the ground doing the same. My playtime was over, however, and the chimp was back in control. Like a tennis player making a serve to an opponent on the other side of the court, with a considerable amount of speed I brought my hand over my head and made contact with the Dachshund somewhere on its torso. It hurt, it hurt like hell but at the same time it was brilliant to watch the canine cartwheel forward through the air like a frisbee. It wasn't until my brain, having done the flight path calculations quickly, alerted me as to its destination that I recovered myself fully and followed with my eyes in horror as it kept going and going and going right over the edge of the roof and past.

I stopped watching. I knew what was going to happen.