One day everything became dogs.
Not transformed gradually, not through any process that was observed happening — one moment the world was the world and the next moment everything was dogs. The ground: dogs, packed tightly, their backs forming an undulating terrain. The buildings: dogs, somehow structural, somehow load-bearing, stacked and interlocked in the forms of architecture. The sky: dogs, distant, somehow atmospheric, their fur the grey of clouds.
Everything smelled like dogs. Warmly, overwhelmingly. The smell of wet fur and something alive beneath it.
People survived initially by standing on the dogs. The dogs did not bite. The dogs did not growl. They panted. They wagged. They were enthusiastic about the whole situation in the way that dogs are enthusiastic about everything. The world being made of dogs seemed, to the dogs, like a fine development.
People ate the dogs, at first reluctantly and then practically. The dogs did not resist being eaten. New dogs appeared where eaten dogs had been.
Cities remained cities, architecturally, because the dogs that formed the buildings held their positions. Streets remained streets because the dogs forming the ground were dense enough to walk on. The infrastructure of human civilization continued, structurally, in the shape of dogs.
The psychological adjustment took approximately two years.
After two years, a person who had grown up in what used to be Brussels said: "I don't really remember what it was like before." She meant this factually. She had been eight when the transition happened. Dogs were what ground was. Dogs were what walls were. Dogs were what clouds were.
She had a dog for a pet, technically. She called him the little dog. He was indistinguishable from the ground except that she had given him a name.
Nobody knows why it happened. The transition was instantaneous and total and has no leading scientific explanation. The leading philosophical explanation is that the universe corrected an imbalance. The leading religious explanation varies. The leading emotional explanation, shared by most survivors of the original world: it's actually fine. The dogs seem happy.
Everything seems happy, actually.
Which is the only part that still feels wrong.