Dog

Blank walls leave much room for imagination. Perhaps that’s what you all want, you men in white coats and blue button-up shirts: for me to paint my stories on the paneled white ceiling and floors. Have you flip through the tiles like a picture book. Leave your questions answered and clean, smooth at the edges, round and telling. But, to be fair, I’ve never felt so important. You stare at me curiously, you sit me down and plead for stories. You speak to me kindly, and promise good things like sweets and closure, before sending me back to my bed where I sit now, staring at the ceiling then back down at my notebook. But I love how you all look at me. I love your words and gestures. I love it when you pat my shoulder and say my name sweetly, your mouths are like buckets of honey. So I will start my paintings for you with a color: A light tan, smooth at her shoulders, then rough and ashy at her elbows, smooth again down her forearms, and calloused and cracked at her palms and knuckles and long brittle nails. I remember the way my mother looked exactly. Her light brown hair and its ragged ends, her thin shoulders and arms and legs, her white, orange, and brown dresses. Today, I bathe in the memories of her humanity. Of her beautiful face, her slim cheeks and big auburn eyes and rosewood-stained lips. You know she exists or at least that she existed. Yet you refuse to hear my words as I relentlessly speak of her. Of her picture books and drawings. Of her dogs. But I swear to you my mother is in my mind always and forever like a smudge on a piece of paper, I attempted to erase but her existence will always be known. Because of that gray smudge. The pest, the mystery, the terror on the center of the page.

I did like seeing her in the kitchen. Or eating toast on the couch with her legs tucked under her body. I liked it when she smiled down at me as she stirred thick mixtures in rusted pots, or when she’d glance away from a news broadcast to catch me yawning. But then she’d look back up with those cold eyes, stone cheeks, straight forehead, and thin mouth, and it was always slightly disturbing. I had wished my Mother would act like any other, I had wished she’d ruffle my hair and kiss my forehead, but I think she much preferred to stare.

I remember several occasions when my shoes were dragging across a path, collecting all of the dust and dirt on the tips of their noses, and I’d sometimes peer up at the houses around me as they slowly degraded in quality. As I ambled further, the wood grew weaker, the grass less green– more yellow and patched, and the doorsteps began to tilt or fold or fall forward or collapse into the earth. William had made these differences distinguishable; the difference in our house sizes, and then, eventually, I began to see the thriving green of his front lawn and the sturdy doorsteps of his home in the pearly white of his teeth, in his smooth peachy skin, in the way his clean blond curls would unfurl and fall down his head, and every time I approached my small and flat wooden house, I always thought about how William must have felt once he reached his own. I wondered how his belly felt– how his chest felt. I wondered if it blossomed– like the array of flowers on his front lawn– if his chest warmed and lightened like the beaming sun. Thinking this way made the worm in my stomach squirm harder, it made my chest churn and grow ice cold to such an alarming degree. I hated thinking about William, and yet I couldn’t stop.

I ignored the pain. I ignored as my insides desperately recoiled and pushed themselves against the wall of my spine, eager to escape while my legs brought me up the stairs and into my house. My mother was standing in the kitchen, her upper body pushed against the counter as she excitedly retold a story to my father, who I never really knew what he was doing. He’d sometimes read newspapers or sit upright on the couch, his eyes boring into the TV with a distance that made me doubt whether he was even truly paying attention to what the machine was presenting to him. Today, he was sitting on the dining table in front of her, staring at his hands then back up at her then down at his hands again. As they spoke, I slipped off my shoes and hung my coat on the rack.

“We’ve rescued a new dog today,” My mother began, “Brought him in yesterday. He’s a big one- a Great Dane! Gosh, is he gorgeous!”

My father stared at her as she spoke.

“He’s got these lovely long legs and beautiful blue eyes. His family abandoned him at our shelter after they realized he was too much work. They were awful! He told me about it too! Wouldn’t feed him enough for his size. He had to sleep outside on their back lawn…”

“Love, he didn’t actually speak to you.”

She continued as though my father hadn’t spoken.

“…He was throwing up loads all over their carpet…they weren’t giving him the right food! He is just disheveled. So hungry and exhausted. He looked like he was on the verge of tears when they first arrived.

“And he seems to like me a lot but our shelter just isn’t good for him, you know?”

My father looked at her cautiously. I walked beside them, opening the fridge to fish out a small plump apple. I remember how red it was and when my teeth dug into its skin I was greeted with a delicious, smooth, and crunchy yellow.

“He’s much too big. The shelter doesn’t give him enough space. Especially his room… and even the backyard! No space at all, poor man.”

“We’re not adopting him, Amelia.”

“Dave- I never said I wanted to adopt him.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Well…”

“We’ve got enough posters of the animals!”

“Don’t talk to me like that, Dave.”

“No-no! Look!” My father sat up, gesturing toward the walls with both hands in the living room beside us. I never looked at the walls or at the bookshelf, at the post mats or at the rugs, or at the mini porcelain statues in our front and back garden, so in these moments I much preferred interpreting their words as words and entirely neglecting their implications. Suddenly my dark room seemed very comforting.

“Posters everywhere! All over the walls! I can’t even see the white paint anymore!”

“Dave, stop!”

“I’m serious, Amy! This is ridiculous! I miss when we talked about anything else!”

As I maneuvered past my father and entered the shadows in our hallway, I could hear my Mother’s faint cries, then, eventually my father’s brief steps and quiet hushing.

“You can’t say that…”

“I know, honey”

“He’s so sad, Dave! I just want him to have a good home.”

“I know, honey. I’m sorry.”

…

I’m surprised my shoes weren’t falling apart at that point. Because, sincerely, I walked as though my head held the weight of a boulder. My shoes dragged and moped, their mouths squished and pulled across the ground, and still their lips were, mostly, intact, their teeth all connected.

The way I carried myself always held such a stark contrast to William’s upbeat movements. He walked like a jog, spoke with a boost then a boom. Even when he called me ‘stupid’. Even when he called my mother ‘crazy’. At least his shoes didn’t drag and his voice didn’t tumble and fall like my own.

Just as I remember the precise details of my mother’s appearance, I also remember everything about William’s. His eyes were large ovals, youthful and bright, blue and green and orange and yellow; a tide pool of luxury and confidence. His skin was smooth and tan, and freckles dusted his cheeks from his time outside playing soccer. He was everything I wanted to be, and yet he spent so much time on me. I couldn’t help but feel special, notable. Like I was something worth focusing on.

The day everything changed, I decided to visit his home. And though this isn’t very important, I always think about it as the thing that led my Mother to do what she did. But perhaps there was something deeper to William, that was my reasoning. Maybe he had a flaw or a detail about him that was misunderstood. Maybe I’d find a crack on the outer wall of his home, a dead possum or squirrel squashed in the middle of his driveway, or dog feces in his front yard. I just wanted to see. I needed to know. I could even compare it to closure– like I needed the reassurance that William’s life wasn’t much better than my own. And when I reached his neighborhood, I was stunned by the bright white and gray buildings. The way a mere house could stack multiple times on top of itself, the mass of it growing larger and larger as the stairs inside ascended. And they multiplied. I probably walked past ten or fifteen of them before finally arriving at the outskirts of William’s yard.

His home was simple. Large and white with multiple open windows lining the walls. The roof faced away from me, staring to the side, dismissing my dejected stance. Tall bushes stood beside the side door like bodyguards and, inside one of the upper windows, placed at the far right, was William. He was laughing with his brother, standing within a door frame; they both chatted and giggled and guffawed boisterously. Until a tall woman with a short auburn bob, walked passed, ushering them down the hall with her palms gently placed on their heads.

The way my guts scrambled was a little more overwhelming that day, I could hear a sound pulsing from the center of my house, toppling and growing larger and more catastrophic the more the voices climbed over one another. My heart thumped and swelled, but I gulped it back down and walked inside my home.

…

“Dog, dog, dog” My father rambled, “dog, dog, and dadgum dog!”

My parents both resided in the living room, my mother sat on the torn couch while my father stood in front of her throwing math papers, novels, placemats, handcloths, and towels all over the carpet. I slid off my sturdy shoes and raised ever so slightly on my toes to wrap the collar of my coat around the hook above me. My father picked up two thick stacks of written papers,

“You know how hard it was to finish these!? I don’t have any copies! Oh my god, Amelia, what is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?!”

My mother stared at the ground, playing with her faded skirt and saying nothing. Her lips sat loosely on one another, comfortable in their seating as though there was nothing going on around her.

“You’re obsessive! I don’t know what to do anymore! You’ve ruined everything! You know how much money it’ll cost to replace everything?!” He gestured toward all of the objects and other materials slumped on the ground like dead bodies. My mother said nothing.

“Speak dammit! Oh my god, please. You’re crazy!”

I decided to approach, and I remember how unfamiliar this feeling was. To enter the scene, the catastrophe. I didn’t gasp or recoil at the sight of our home, I just stared like my mother did.

The furniture was partially ripped, sections of the carpet were lifted from the clutches of the wood, a few corners of the walls were drawn on, and piles of materials on the floor were scribbled over with sketches and well-formed drawings of several different breeds of dogs.

My father glanced down at me, his forehead creased, his lips drastically pulled into a deep frown. Tears wobbled from little holes pinched along the outer lining of his eyes, and this intimacy lasted for only a second before I left. I walked down the hall and toward my bedroom. Silent and undisturbed, just like my mother.

I think this was around this time when my father left. Because I woke up one morning to my Mother eating fried eggs at the dining table, and she gestured for me to stand beside her. She looked up at me, her eyes warm and tender like melted chocolate or hot cocoa, or even the silky bark of my favorite oak tree beside the playground at school, and as I glanced around the house I witnessed no noise or clatter. I think I just knew.

My Mother didn’t go to work that day. Well, not properly.

“I’m popping in and out today,” She told me, “I need to pick something up.”

I wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but the thoughts quickly diminished once taken over by the intimacy shared between me and William that day. Intimacy, that’s what I thought to myself as I walked back home, but now that I take the time to think back on it, I don’t think he thought much about me at all. He liked my size and my height. He liked to pull at my hair and push me to the dirt, but he never thought of me as something to love. I think this would’ve killed me if I had realized it any sooner.

My house stirred no sounds that day. In fact, it was alarmingly silent. The birds didn’t chirp, the squirrels may as well have all been hidden beneath the ground, their mouths stuffed with dirt and suffocating. It was so quiet I felt that I could even hear my mother’s distant breathing. I opened the wooden gate, covered in green froth and splinters, walked up the small path toward my house, and entered carefully.

The sight of my mother was uncanny because she was smiling. She smiled warmly and with enthusiasm. It made me shiver. I didn’t have time to take off my shoes, hang up my coat, or loosen my hold on my bag before I witnessed the large creature sitting in the kitchen. Its skinny tail whacked itself again and again against the tiled floor, and its head turned toward me slowly - or maybe it was fast, like a glitch? Its mouth cut into its snout, and its bubbly gums swelled out of the wound like pus, the skin on its jaw falling down to the center of its long wormy neck, and its whole body was covered with a dark coat of short gray fur.

“This is our new friend,” My mother began, “His name is Ernie.”

I smiled grimly at the creature, but it didn’t smile back at me. It just frowned. Ernie never smiled, no matter how much love my mother gave to it.

Now, these next few events are hazy. I tried my hardest to stray my attention away from my mother, but during these moments it was impossible. I don’t remember when the floor became swarmed with furry, huffing, drooling beasts, but it happened so quickly. Within an instant, I was no longer able to move. The dogs toppled over each other like ants, like larvae. I think they began to nip at each other's ears as my mother no longer fed them. She liked looking at them, and talking to them, and stroking their little bodies, but perhaps she believed they could feed themselves. Maybe she thought they could stand on their hind legs, search through the cabinets and whip up complex recipes (I find this very funny), fend for themselves like mini humans. Only they were stupid and had to resort to turning to one another for scraps.

I can only retell the events in numbers; it’s the only way my mind can recall those few days in proper order.

1. I eventually had to drop out of school because moving grew harder and harder the more my mother stole dogs from the shelter and the streets. I believe I slept on the couch, though it was always so hard with a load of torsos wriggling against the sides. I hoped to think I didn’t miss much, but I often wondered what William was doing.

2. A few days passed, and I grew hungry and weak. I think the way the dog's bellies grumbled and the way their throats whined amplified my own famished stomach and my weak arms and legs. I didn’t see my mother much. But, then again, when did I ever? She spent a lot of time with Ernie, and if I had to guess, to her, Ernie became the most important thing in the world. I wonder when that first began? Had there always been an empty slot inside of her heart, inside of her mind? And that day, when Ernie first appeared, was it finally filled?

3. I remember finally seeing her on the couch after I managed to clean out my room and sleep soundly. She was sitting with Ernie stroking his short hair. It was skinny and shaking, malnourished and weak, which was surprising to me. Perhaps she had stolen the dogs just for show. I remember she didn’t pay any attention to the hounds sniffing around her feet, she loved only his icy blue eyes, but I hated them. They were cold, an artificial copy of William’s whose eyes were warm like tidepools on a beach. I even sometimes contemplated killing Ernie. I hated the way its presence reeked of the privilege of being touched by my mother. I wanted Ernie gone, but I was always too much of a coward to do anything.

4. Ernie went missing. I supposed he died, maybe the others finally got to it. Maybe they tore the lack of meat from his bones and feasted. Or maybe it died of starvation. I contemplated these possibilities greatly until I came across his body under the couch, gaunt and fragile, slumped on the ground like a ragdoll. The sight wasn’t comforting like I’d hoped it would be. In fact, it was terrifying and as I sat up to look around I spotted multiple dead bodies scattered across the living room and in the kitchen and down the hall toward my and my mother's bedrooms. Their shoulders looked too much like my own, and a shiver so violent and petrifying split apart my spine and the joints linking my shoulders to my arms and my hips to my legs. I had to hide. I couldn’t look at them anymore.

5. I stayed in my room for a day or two, surviving off of drink bottles I had left under my bed for an indeterminate amount of time, counting little indents in the walls and the ceilings, tapping my heels against the floor, wrapping my blankets around my head until I nearly suffocated. Until one night, I heard my mothers footsteps. She was walking down the hall slowly, carefully tiptoeing over and around the dogs, until I heard a creak or a whoosh or a pull. I can’t really explain it, and suddenly my mother was walking back with added weight. She was dragging something down the hallway.

6. Maybe the years that have pulled me away from that night, the years that stretched my bones and pulled down my face, tugged the little hairs from deep within the pores of my chin and neck until I grew thick beards that I rarely shaved, and punched swollen bruises beneath my eyes, warped to shape my childhood into a confusing haze. But eventually, eventually, sometime during those two weeks, I grew too lonely and afraid to be away from my mother any longer. I needed her, I needed anything she could give me. So, I left my room.

It was the middle of the night or early in the morning, I couldn’t tell, and the hallway was drenched in a thick blanket of black. I squinted at the wall in front of me then stared wide-eyed so my eyes could adjust. The color brightened, the carpet stayed relatively the same, and I (or my body) was ready to approach my mother’s bedroom. The walk was excruciating. No dogs were squirming around my feet and for once the lack of body heat left me cold and lonely. I didn’t know where they were, and I didn’t bother to check. The carpet nearly pulled me down with every step that I took; it nearly ate up my body. I like to think it was trying to save me. Maybe the dogs were actually shivering somewhere, terrified of the tearing and the sowing and the gluing going on in my mothers' room. Maybe they thought they were next.

My hand floated until it caught itself on the door handle and twisted it gently. The door pushed open.

I didn’t see my mother at first.

My eyes searched the muddled bedsheets, desperate for a body, desperate for a source of warmth. They had never looked so empty.

I scanned over the closet that was open loosely but was too afraid to step any closer. Then I looked down. Right in front of me. To the carpet that sat beneath the foot of her bed. There she was.

Squatting on the ground, snout bloody and peeled- so was the rest of her body. She was covered in a coat of fur that swung over her shoulders and wrapped around her stomach. Whiskers stretched out of her cheeks and forehead, and a set of ears flopped pathetically on the sides of her head.

My shaking arms somehow moved.

Toward the light switch.

They flicked it on.

And then I knew.

I knew it was my mother.

Because Ernie's eyes were blue.