When two dolphin lovers, Zeeep and Eeeoo—vowing to be together forever —lose their lives in a poacher’s snare, they learn their next lives will be on land: Eeeoo becomes Sabrina, a comatose little girl in Montreal, Canada and Zeeep becomes Xico, a flea-ridden dog in a tiny village in Brazil. It seems the two will never be together but the magic of fate relies on a higher knowing. This crossover novel leads the reader on adventures with Xico the dog through mystical travels visiting Otherworldly dimensions, learning the world of healing. The two lovers eventually reunite in Brazil where a famous shaman and psychic surgeon lives. When they meet again, Xico has learned to be a medium and is helping the shaman. He lovingly helps to initiate the healing of Sabrina. When Sabrina’s desperate mother steals Xico and takes him to Canada to be with her daughter, the Brazilian villagers rally together to get their “healing dog” back so he can do his God-given job.

DOG of GOD: The Novel

a wild romp through magical worldsBy Cher Slater-Barlevi

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2012 Cher Slater-Barlevi
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-5348-1

Chapter One

MONTREAL, CANADA THE LAST OF A HARD WINTER, 2004

A police car moves slowly down a quiet residential street. Due to the short winter days, the evening cold is already crusting the snow, making the roads slippery, making it difficult for the officers to find the house number in the dimness.

The patrol car finally slides next to the curb and the drone of the motor dies. The officers inside wipe the fogged windshield, straining to see the small clapboard house just up the shoveled walkway. Its one lit window shines across the soft-mounded yard.

The two police officers exit and head for the house, sliding and slipping with every step. Tramping up the stairs to the porch, they pound on the red front door. As they wait, cold puffs billow from their nostrils. A woman peers through the curtain, then jerks it closed.

The wait seems interminable for the two officers as they hit themselves for circulation under their jackets, stamping and blowing against the cold.

Yes? ... the door opens a crack.

Lillian Fleur?

Yes ...

Do you mind if we come in?

What is this about, officers?

May we enter and discuss our reason, it's very cold ...

She makes no indication of being hospitable.

Madam Fleur, we have evidence that you are harboring a small dog confiscated from Paramanguaia (Para-mon-gee-a), Brazil.

I have no dog, officers, so if you'll excuse me ... The door starts to close.

We've just interviewed your neighbors, and they have verified that you indeed have a dog on your premises answering to the description we have on file.

The door shuts and remains shut. The officers knock again, wait, knock louder, then pound the door. Still no movement. The larger officer yells through the door, This animal is in your possession illegally, Madam. Open up now, or we will have to take more forceful measures!

The woman opens the door, her arms folded across her body, but she says nothing. She is noticeably nervous, with little beads of sweat on her upper lip, even in the winter's cold. The officer continues in a normal tone, Madam, According to Canadian Law 13789 of the penal code, you are in possession of stolen property—a dog from Brazil.

Tears well up in the woman's eyes. Please leave me alone! I have no dog, I-I don't know what you're talking about.

We see that indeed you have just returned from a trip to Brazil transporting a dog. Sergeant Fernando Oswego Rodrigues, a high ranking official from Brazil has personally contacted us for verification so this dog must be very important ...

She slams the door and the police hear the lock clicking into place—along with a dog barking somewhere inside.

Chapter Two

ZEEEP & EEEOO THE DOLPHINS IN THE OCEAN OFF THE PACIFIC COAST

Away out in the blue of the waters and away down in the black of the Ocean depths-an event is going on. Two lovers are about to partake in their daily race that starts very early in the morning and goes until one or both are too exhausted and can go no further. Today will be a great race because it is the beginning of the currents of warm; the dolphins have been traveling a long way together to elude the northern waterways of the cold ...

Two feet cubit times fifteen raised to the fifth power—got it! Go now! Go-go-go!

WHOOSH—up, up, up, dark to light—major tail kick, FA-WAP ... AIR. Breathe, in-out, in-out, fill lungs, sheebit first time it always burns, get over it, thankgawd cooling: in-out-in-out, she's in front of me, tilt head down-WHOOOOHUMPPT—water: faster with more thrust, com'on, com'on, com'on, thankgawd she's falling back, yahahaha ye-ssss always faster underwater, feeeeels sooo good.

SONAR READING: object ten feet head.

TRACKING: moving sideways, moving upward: thick, thin, thick, thin; strings together, strings out = lunch!

My fave! Squid ... ahhhh.

Race canceled.

Lookit her fizzzt past, damn she's fast. So glad to have her back—I'm smiling, I'm smiling, she always makes me smile. That's why I love her. But my tummy calls.

Squid.

Two feet, ten inches north by northeast—go!

YES! STRIKE! Ahh, yessss—yumyumyum, whooooo tickleeey; struggling, squirmin' little tasty squididy squid: numnumnum, ahhhhh sooo satisfiyin', ahhhh.

Uh oh.

She was back. She was puffin'. She was mad.

Hey, you can't do that, nose head! she was sayin'.

Gawd, it always drove her crazy when I changed my mind so fast. Couldn't help it, though. Always said, Opportunity shows itself—ATTACK!—or it just passes right on by looozer.

Besides, I just happened to be a teeny-bit hungry after a whole morning of racing. Gotta give it to her though, man, she's got it—fast as hezzop—great competitor. Keeps my torso tight. That's my girl, Eeeoo. You might think Eeeoo's her name, it's not. It's her frequency—Eeeeeeooo—think about it.

Me? I'm Zeeep: also fizzzz fast, dikdik impatient, love to race, always racing ... but it's not my finest talent. My finest? Well, take a guess ... heh, heh. And my next finest attribute? I am an aquatic acrobatic artist. I excel at: back-falling, breaching, three-quarter body breaching, half-body lobtailing, flips of all kinds: somersaults, twists: right turns, left, sqeezzzzipper. I am, however, still working on the spin. Whoa! Now that's a beebo-a-ramma. Saw it demonstrated off the coast of Santa Barbara, whole pods of these pinstriped jobs executing with the finest precision, all the hezzop over miles-and-miles of territory—greatest thing I'd ever seen. Dikdik!

I admit I'm a show-off. Most dolphins are.

Take Eeeoo, now she's ... she's to the extreme. She was famous once, ya know. Truth. Was a main feature in some kind of Aquatic Zoo. Kinda sad story. Whadda life, workin' with the humans. Not somethin' I'd a chose. The stories? Gaaaawd.

Now, some of those human folks were good, loving, devoted—even stellar—but man, some of 'em—sick! Sick to the core. Nasty, nasty bunch. So much so, they fitzbing un-did all the good.

How'd Eeeoo ever get into a situation like that? Well, we were young, just teenagers. We were each other's first love. Outta control. Sheebit like that always leads to trouble. Eeeoo got addicted. Yeah, strung out on tour boats cuisine that would chug up and down the coast. She was hooked on the amazing eats they'd throw off the side of those boats—prize fish, delicacies not from around here. Not so tasty, I thought. Not fresh from the ocean, I could tell. But a farm pond (I later found out.) But not Eeeoo, no,no,no, she became fanatical to the prestige of foreign dining. I guess. I dunno. Women.

I gotta confess though, that for a while I even got hooked, heh, heh, heh. Yep. What was addicting was free food, heck yesss—more time for fun. Now that I think of it I'm still addicted. I'm addicted to fun ... and again with the confessions: that's why it was so hard to go through all the stuff that happened to us because of it.

Chapter Three

SABRINA MONTREAL, CANADA WINTER, 1998

The nurse's eyes turned to her. Squinched way down to a hard line, her eyebrows grew together and two worry lines popped up between them. Sabrina could feel her whole body tense up.

Because we have vaccinations, the nurse replied. I need to review your records, young lady ...

What was she talking about? She remembered the whole month of looking into the mirror and seeing all the big red welts all over her body along with a thick, fat neck, not to mention the feeling someone had scraped her throat raw with a knife when she swallowed. She'd looked like a ... like a ... well, Snooker, the boy that lived next door, had called her a holymoly freak-o-zoid. He'd pointed at her, scrunched up his face real ugly-like and said she looked like she was growing ... volcanoes! She agreed. Her face was a barren wasteland: the likes of the man-in-the-moon.

She found this a fascinating landscape. If she picked at them, they'd bleed and all kinds of pus would run out and after a day the mountainous obtrusions would cap themselves in black. She couldn't help not picking them, heck they itched like crazy. Her mother would reprimand her. Stop it! she'd say, while safety-pinning the cuffs closed on Sabrina's pajama sleeves to restrict her criminal fingers from their adventures. She'd ask over and over, Do you want scars for the rest of your life?

Her mother's attempt was futile. Sabrina always found a hole-way for at least one of her fingers to wriggle out of both sleeves—if not, she'd make one by chewing, pulling, and biting down hard with her back teeth then grinding them together on the spit-wet, thread-barren fabric. Two fingers were all she needed for anything, especially a victory over the boils.

The pus fascinated her: all warm and so sticky that when she put her fingers together they'd stick. Maybe she could use it for glue on something—so she tried to stick two pieces of Kleenex together. She found it was best to let the pus dry before it would stick together really good.

The boredom always drove her even crazier.

She wasn't allowed to read because the doctor had said that her eyes would be ruined and hers was the only family she knew that didn't own a TV in the whole wide world. Her mother said that it ruined people's brains and made children stupid and fat. What about crazy, Mom!, she thought to herself, grunting hard as she ripped her doll's arm from its body.

Of course, it was also taboo to go out to play. She was sure she was quarantined with something deadly. No one had told her yet (who would?). She had just figured it out herself. Her older sister had been quarantined when she was little. She was the only kid in ages that had contracted polio. Most unusual they'd said, a freakish happening. She was moved to the back of the house, closed off from everyone for at least a year. Well, maybe it wasn't a year, Sabrina wasn't quite sure, because it happened when she was really young. She does remember, however, the doctor and her mother wearing masks that bandits wore in cartoons, when they went in to tend to her. What Sabrina couldn't figure out was how Patti hadn't gone stark-raving mad having to stay in her room for so long. Maybe that's why she's such a weird duck ... Sabrina had shivered over this realization. Was she the next to be infected with the same mental disorder?

Sabrina loved being outdoors. One day, against her mother's wishes, she scooted her bed right up against the window. Because she was on the second floor, if she got real close to the glass she could pretend she was flying like a bird over the trees outside—that—and she loved huffing real hard on the cold glass with her hot breath so she could print her name with her pointer finger and make little pictures all around it. When the finger drawings would fade, she could make them come back magically by hot-breathing all over the window again. It made her a little light headed, but she liked the feeling—this too, was another adventure she could go on if she kept it up—she noticed the room would change colors and little stars would appear.

Cool.

There were some perks in being sick, as her sister had pointed out. One, you never had to make your bed—heck, you could eat food in it if you wanted to. Two, you never had to clean up your room. Three, you could draw until your hand fell off if you wanted to. Sabrina loved to draw. Someday she was going to be a ... let's see, what could you be if you were old and could draw. I could fly a plane ... and draw in the sky. She sighed. That'd be great. Then she'd have all this money by then, as much as she could find and throw it out the window for all the poor children who didn't have food and a nice place to live. And the kids would catch it and they'd buy mansions for their parents to live in. And they could buy horses to ride to school and then they wouldn't get picked on by the other kids because they'd be so much taller and bigger on top of a horse ...

She looked out her window and noticed Snooker was tramping around in the snow in the yard next door—his snowsuit two-times larger than he was. He'd seen her now and was making all kinds of faces at her. Snooker was given that name for a very good reason. What a brat, she thinks. He threw a few snowballs and one actually hit the window and made her jump, and he laughed and laughed and pointed up at her and then he fell down in the snow and rolled around.

He calls me a dork! she thinks.

Feelings of jealousy made her grind her teeth. If only she could go outside. If only she could go outside ... she'd go skiing again ... with her father. Not her sister.

Just her father and her—alone—this time.

The last time she went skiing was with her father and her sister, just a few weeks before she got sick. She usually does anything sporty quite easily. At school she's called Tomboy-Tommy-Tom. She was proud of it. She's always hated frou-frous, except Grandmère's French stuff—that she loved. She hated dresses of any kind. Hated skinny models, thought they looked kind of sickly, kind of like what she looked like now, but without all the splotches and protruding neck glands.

Anyway, she'd never been skiing before so she had been giving her father a hard time the whole trip, whining about this and that. Her older sister was a teenager so she wasn't talking to either one of them the whole way. She had plugged herself into a space in between her headphones, her body gyrating to an irritating beat, which sounded like sh-sh-shhhhhh sh-sh-shhhhhhh to everyone else. Once, Sabrina had to talk to her when they'd pulled in for gas and she'd jerked out one of Patti's headphones and screamed, you have to take me to the bathroom! and Patti had gotten all P-O'd because Sabrina had ripped out a lock of her hair tangled in the headphone and had yelled back, Go yourself, you're not a stupid baby! and then both of them had shrieked, Dad-dee! right together at the very same time and Dad had bellowed, Quiet! Am I going to have to whoop both of you? ... Huh?

Oh, it was a long, hard drive.

Sabrina had been so worried. Was she going to die if she didn't know how to ski? It was possible, she was sure. The ache in her stomach made her think so. She'd tried to imagine standing on top of those long boards that she'd seen Dad clamp between the ski rack pinchers. In her mind, she'd step into the bindings (how that worked she couldn't imagine), take off, and head straight down the mountain. She knew there had to be a way to turn those things, to make them stop, but for the life of her she couldn't figure out how and the more she thought about it, the more it made her nervous feet hit the back of the seat and made her chew her gum faster. And the more and more butterflies were flapping all around in her stomach, the more she'd make up silly songs and sing as loud as she could, which was getting everyone mad. She didn't care, she couldn't help it.

By the time they had arrived at the Ski Area, of course, she was an utter nervous wreck. As her father was unpacking the gear from the trunk of their Peugeot, the first thing out of her mouth was, Dad, I have to pee, I have to pee, and after that, of course, came, I'm hungry! and after that Daddy? I don't want to ski! You can't make me.

Her dad had joked with her saying, Ah, my little cherry blossom, me thinks wee are a leettle scar-red ahhhh, perchance, ma chérie?

He always used a fake French accent in a funny voice, his charming tactic to get her to smile. Then he released two skis from the ski rack and presented her with the ungainly package she was to carry. She promptly fell to the ground and refused to budge.

The quad chair was a breeze to get on. Benjamin had requested the attendant stop the chair completely so Sabrina could sit right down and scoot over to the side at the far end. Benjamin sat very close and put his protective arm around his kids but Patti wouldn't have it. She made a teenage stink over it and moved herself with a pout to the furthest end of the chair.

Other than that, the ride up was a success. Sabrina had marveled at the flight over the white embroidered treetops. She'd pointed at the jutting mountain that had shown gold above the valley they were leaving behind. She'd transformed her nervousness into excitement and exploration. Benjamin was in awe over how a child could do that. He wished he had retained that characteristic from his own childhood. His obstinate ego, he realized, had become his nemesis.

Just as they were to dismount, he was careful to remind Sabrina to hold her skis in a point and to bend her legs and to lean in the directions she wanted to go and that would help her to turn—this was going to give her the control she needed.

Sabrina stood up, holding onto her poles, hearing in her mind all the instructions from her father. She saw her father skiing ahead, pulling her from the tips of her poles and the chair continuing on and her sister streaking past like a shot, never to be heard or seen again all day long.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from DOG of GOD: The Novelby Cher Slater-Barlevi Copyright © 2012 by Cher Slater-Barlevi. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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