The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. 

—Martin Luther King Jr. 

I could not hear the dog whistle. But I pretended nonetheless. I wanted to be like the other dogs. And the Master never suspected. 

  I could see it, however. The head Master would drag the tip of his tongue, a wet swab, over his lips, take a deep breath, his nostrils flaring temporarily, and with a body tense as if about to emit a guttural scream, he would press his lips against the edges of the shimmering silver whistle and blow. And then nothing. Not a sound. Simply the sound of all the dogs, including me, shuffling into organized lines in the cobblestone courtyard of the king. The sound he played was undoubtedly so majestic that only the ears of a dog were tuned to accept its frequency, for no human ever reacted to the sound. How I too longed to hear its beauty. 

  All the other dogs, regardless of whether they were bound to the clergy, the aristocracy or the gentry, or even the lowest of mutts owned by some peasant, could hear the whistle. When the Master blew the whistle, every canine would gallop from his master to form perfect lines of even numbers in the courtyard. Unlike their masters’ divisions, drawn on breed, gender and social class, the lines were a mix of dogs, the aristocratic beside the peasant. 

  Even the wildest of dogs—dogs who lived outside the courtyard’s walls but within the kingdom’s lands—could hear the whistle. When the whistle sounded and all the dogs in the kingdom gathered in the courtyard, the wild dogs would draw near to the rabble from beyond the kingdom’s outer wall and bay. Perhaps they were describing the whistle’s sound. Or yearning for a master. Somehow still secretly bound to the whistle, the wild dogs too served the king; they protected the kingdom from strangers who strayed from the roads and passed between the foliage in the adjoining forest, strangers who preferred the cover of night over the royal lantern-lit paths. As long as the strangers to these lands kept to the path, the wild dogs let them be.

The Dog Whistle appears in Resistance, Revolution and Other Short Stories.