I’ve been keeping a pretty tight lid on my latest novel, but I wanted to share a small glimpse of the world I’ve been playing in. The book is a horror story set in 1992 Los Angeles, right as the Riots begin. This short story actually helped inspire the whole thing.

The Dogwoman of Watts is a real local cryptid, with reported sightings in and around the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles in 1961. Most people dismiss the sightings as a hoax since the reports were so limited. But I like to think she’s only visible to certain people, and that those who do see her don’t often live long enough to talk about it.

As for my novel Undertow, once I decided to age the main character down, this piece no longer quite fit in the book.

So it ended up here instead—just for you.

THE DOGWOMAN OF WATTS

by Cherrae L. Stuart ©2024

The misty ghosts writhe and flow, bathed in streetlight pooling on my neighbor's lawn. Marine layer, my dad calls it, this fog that rolls down the streets even though we live miles from any beach. Some of it is. Just not the shapely, forlorn forms that hover around Mr. Franks' front yard.

I can't prove it to anyone, but I think those are girls who have gone missing. Girls he made go missing. Always the same, a runaway or drug addict, the police come once, take their notes, and then move on. Cases stay open, and families stay broken.

The tendrils combine and separate in a dance that seems at times joyful. Happier in death than they were allowed to be in life.

Gunshots ring out in the night. The echoes are blocks away, so they don't concern me. I catch movement a few houses over. Mini-blinds clatter down behind bar-covered windows. Neat rows of close brick and stucco homes shield the families from the outside, the heat and the crime, the cops, and the smog. Cocooned in the blue glow of their televisions, the rat-a-tat-tat is as normal a night sound as the crickets.

I reach into the bushes to turn on the water spigot, and the crickets silence upon my approach. I have to lean back to keep my face a distance from the birds of paradise my grandmother planted there. A teacher once told me they got their name because the pointed blooms resembled a bird in flight. To me and everyone I know, they look more like the long neck and head of a flamingo or ostrich preparing to strike. As a kid, I thought they dripped poison. Even if they are not toxic, their sharp beaks might whip around and poke my eye out.

The hose jumps in my hand as the water flows through it. I grip the pistol trigger and the mist arcs over the lawn. My dad says watering the grass at night will prevent scorching. He says the hole in the ozone layer makes the California sunlight more intense. The droplets act as magnifying glasses, burning the lush greenery a dull, lifeless brown like Mrs. Jackson's next door. She waters in the morning, smoking her Virginia Slims in her housecoat and slippers.

I think I know more than my dad about a lot of things, but lawn care isn't one of them, so I don't argue. The harsh heat of the day relaxes into the dull heat of the night. The oppressive summer has gone on for too long and I find myself looking forward to school starting up again. They have air conditioning. I hop over the concrete path that splits our yard in two. It's still hot enough to cook my bare feet if I linger there. The damp grass tingles between my toes. Our lawn is small and only takes a few minutes to water, but the night is quiet, and I'm hoping to catch another glimpse of my monster.

I don't think she would ever hurt me. I wouldn't say she is here to protect me either. She didn't protect the women whose spirits twist a depressed tango across the street.

The first time I saw her, I thought I was going crazy. A long loping body like a dusky greyhound stalked down the middle of the wide asphalt street. A distinctly female head with a dark shag of hair sat atop the lupine body like a werewolf stopped mid-change. She padded over to the ghosts on Mr. Franks' lawn. Her pendulous breasts hung low and swinging. The misty spirits alighted around, caressing her like an old friend. I think she gives them comfort. The ghosts seeing my monster isn't a voucher I can use to convince anyone of her existence.

But I don't need to.

Just before school let out for the summer, I heard it. An undercurrent of fear and revulsion and excitement nestled between kids learning how to jump-jump to the new Kris Kross song on the radio, or shouting the lyrics of what fast girls did in Burger King bathrooms from the older Digital Underground song we weren't allowed to listen to. Somebody's brother's girlfriend, who went to a different school, saw her too. In Watts near The Towers, a day before, a kid found the body of Tasha Sullivan, half-naked and thrown in a glass-covered empty lot.

The Dog-Woman of Watts.

The name invoked terror and a perverse curiosity like Dracula or Frankenstein, but she belonged to us, to the hood. I don't know how big the Dog-Woman's territory is, but it's more than just Watts. I'm all the way north, at least 7 miles. Still South Central, but she would have to cross the freeway going west toward the ocean, stopping well before the nicer parts of town.

Maybe she only goes where the bad things happen?

I drag the hose back to the spindle and crank the winder to put it away. If I linger any longer, I'll be greeted with disapproving grunts from my grandmother as she barely looks up from her show, 20/20 or Unsolved Mysteries. Mumbling under-the-breath comments about what happens to girls who stay out late, being slack. I don't have a curfew, not officially, because at 15, I'm not allowed to go out at all. It's not like there are any boys “with whom I am willing to sacrifice my future to cavort” as Gran says. I don't have any girlfriends either. Not unless you count the dead girls on Mr. Franks' front lawn.

I don't think they count.

But I know something she doesn't know I know. My dad was born when she was seventeen, and she married at eighteen to my grandpa, who was not my dad's real father. But I think saying it out loud might hurt her, so I keep it to myself.

A long minty green Cadillac glides up the block. I freeze, tucked into the shadows of bushes by the water hose spindle. I can hide here until he goes inside. It turns into the driveway across the street, and Mr. Franks gets out. A small, unassuming man, not unlike my father. His close-cut fade doesn't hide the balding. Top-heavy, his spindly legs hold up a beer gut, like a tick on stilts. He wears white shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and gold chains, and sandals with ashy feet. Even in the wintertime, he's sweaty.

He has deep brown skin and the whitest teeth that smile too wide. His cold black eyes glitter with mean humor. They probe, and they dig. When he looks at me, I feel uncovered. I recoil from his hot wet hand on my shoulder at the neighborhood block parties, from his comments about how grown I'm getting. His digging eyes shoveling off the layers of my clothes, and pride and self-esteem. I think he would like to find the soft center of me and take a bite out of it.

Would I become a twisting ghost forever dancing on his lawn? I think so.

He goes around to the passenger side of his ice cream colored car and opens the door. A woman stumbles out. She's drunk or high or both. She wobbles on high heels like a baby deer. She looks like a jewel. Her shiny spandex pants and top made of sequins sparkle in the streetlight's glow. Her hair is fluffed out, and even from here, I can tell she is beautiful underneath her smeared lipstick and running mascara. I wonder if I will see her on the lawn.

A dog howls in the distance.