This Dog by Shawn Nocher

This Dog


This dog, this dog she never wanted in the first place but that her grown-ass son had given to her, thrust at her—not a gift, but a relinquishment—is a pain in the ass. The minute he had shoved it into her arms and it had wrapped its paws around her neck and slung its rump in the cup of her hands, the moment it drew its nose across her cheek, and she had looked over it to see her son wipe his wrist across his mouth and then shove his empty fists so hard into his pants pockets that his pants slid down on his hips and caught on the knobs of his hipbone, the moment she heard him say take him, just take him, her heart had shattered and the shards had shot off in every direction—into her lungs and her liver, slicing down through her bowels, ricocheting off of her ribs. 

The dog must be on a leash. She knows this. He is still young, roughly a year, a little more. No one knows for sure. He has a tendency to attack small animals. Cats and squirrels, groundhogs, miniature dogs—maybe, she’s not sure—and while he is not a big dog, a mix of beagle and muscle-bound pit bull, he can nearly yank her elbow from the socket when he jolts to the end of his leash. He once caught a squirrel so fast she barely had time to register it before he leapt at the base of the tree, snapping at a scurrying bag of fur. He managed to snatch the tail and whipped so hard the squirrel flew from his mouth and landed in the boughs of a sapling that dipped dangerously close to the leaping dog.  Dazed and pissed, it scrambled to the highest branches, chitting overhead while the dog ran in circles beneath it swirling the leash it had ripped from her negligent grip. 

They are on a walk along the road that curves the marsh and the smells are too much for him. He darts into the saw grass and back to her again, leashed and yanking her in every direction. She walks more and more since she had to take the dog. Not for exercise, not for her health, not even for the dog, but because she can’t help it. There is an urgency to keep walking and a hope that it will get her someplace different.

The pines along this side of the marsh are thick along the roadside, but beneath them is a wooded darkness with little undergrowth so that she can see across the water that deepens in its center and then thins again to the other side where she lives. Coated now with a skim of early summer pollen wrinkling in the breeze. She can see all the way back to her house, which is square and normal, much like all the others, a two-story block of white with blue shutters and a gabled addition that she refers to as the three-season room and where she once imagined long afternoons with a cup of tea and a magazine but now no longer ventures into unless it is to slip the dog a biscuit while he curls in a spot of sun. She overfeeds him and so the walks are good for him. She measures his meals carefully but then can’t resist slipping him bits of chicken, the leftover half of a sandwich she can’t eat anyway, the scraps from their dinner. All he has to do is stand beside her and blink. Her husband says the dog will get fat but he does it, too, and sneaks him his leftover ice cream bowl at the end of the day.

The dog comes to her now as they stand at the start of a small peninsula, treed on either side and edged in copper-topped Pye weed, but with a sandy path wide enough to drag canoes to the tip for launching. She and her son used to walk here when he was a small boy and as soon as they reached the peninsula she would nod and allow him to run ahead. By this time he often had a stick—maybe taller than himself—or a large silver heron feather or even a bit of interesting trash he had picked up along the way in his hand. He would hold the stick or the feather, the broken shard of a taillight, above his head and run headlong like a small warrior along the path to the very tip. There, he would turn to her and wave a glorious wave before spinning back to squat at the water. She would walk slowly, allowing her son this safe distance from her, bound by the water’s edge with no cars to worry about, just the endless view across the marsh.

The dog punches his muzzle into her thigh, begs to be released from his leash. If she were to release him now he would tear down the path, kicking sprays of sand from his back feet, to the end of the trail, then turn back to her and run with the same joy, his mouth blown back in what almost looks like a smile, skidding to circle her, herding her to follow him, and then back again to the muddy tip that ebbs into the water where he will leave hundreds of pawed impressions in the soggy edges. Sometimes, against her better judgment, she lets him loose here. But she must scan the stretch of land first, making sure there are no canoes coming in that he will bark at, no small children playing at the seams of the water that he can jump on. He’s too exuberant, too careless with his enthusiasm. Early morning, the sun rises low in the sky and cuts a sparkling path to the tip of the land. She squints into the sun, looks for the giant blue herons. So slow to lift off and she is certain he could catch one and wrangle it down from its graceful ascent. She can’t bear the thought of it. 

Her son is gone, in so many ways, and she wants to think of it as temporary, as a thing he is going through, but that illusion collapsed with the shoving of the dog at her. Her husband always said their job was to give their children wings. So she had agreed to his going to school on the other side of the country. Such a distance wasn’t necessary. She knows that now. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that crap. It wasn’t like he got into Stanford or anything. Just a mediocre mid-size college 3,000 miles away. There were plenty of mediocre mid-size colleges on the east coast, but no, he had to go to California. Her daughters, one of whom probably could have gone to Stanford, had been perfectly happy to land at good eastern colleges—one at the state University, the Honors Program, she reminds herself now with a touch of pride she knows she isn’t entitled to, and the other up to Boston where she is now a freshman. They expect to visit the younger one next weekend. She will have to figure out what to do with the dog. She wants to bring him. She can’t sleep, hasn’t slept a full night in months and the only thing that soothes her at night is the sound of his breath beside her. She gets up three or four times a night—to sip water, pee, check her phone—and the dog always lifts his head to watch her, sometimes follows her into the hallway where she sits on the top step and he folds beside her, his head on her lap while she whispers into the phone…hope you’re okay, call me, please, any time, hope you’re okay. Once she said, Why are you doing this to us? You’re killing us! But that had been a mistake. He had texted back hours later. Why is everything always all about you? 

Her husband has taken to sleeping in the guest room. It is not a feud between the two of them, but more of a distancing required by their syncopated journey. They’re traveling through the same muddy trench but at slightly different rhythms, every so often landing on the same sharp note. They agree to file a missing persons report after not hearing from him for two long weeks, but then her husband cancels it when he calls to say he will go to rehab—but not yet—just not yet. They agree to close his negative balance checking account that has cost them hundreds in overdraft fees and not to wire him any more money, but when he calls to say it’s raining and please, he’s begging her, will she get him a room for the night, she does it. Even though she knows it seems it never rains in Southern California. All night, the scraps of the lyrics hung just beyond the tip of her tongue until she was compelled to Google them. Now she knows them in their entirety. Out of work, I'm out of my head / Out of self respect, I'm out of bread / I'm underloved, I'm underfed, I want to go home... 

He is not under-loved, never has been. Is that even a thing, she asks the dog who sneezes and whips his head side to side so that his ears flap-flap against his head. It’s not, she says and she feels the pull of it all, the way she is tethered to her children, a flotilla of boats tied up to one another and the sinking of her son dragging them all down. 
 
They strategized—cancel his phone? No, they agreed. Too dangerous. And they both exhaled at the same time, relieved to imagine he could still reach out to them when he’s ready. Just the punch of a few numbers in the phone and they would be on the next plane again. They would have to get someone to watch the dog.
 
He had said it would be better when he got the dog. He told her it would keep him accountable to someone. He sent pictures of the two of them hiking, snuggling in his bed in a mound of blankets with matching goofy grins, short clips of the pup pouncing on her son’s feet, digging in his water bowl, shaking a chew toy and then settling his paws over it to pull out entrails of stuffing. He is mostly black with a jagged white blaze down his chest and caramel jowls and brows that lift comically when her son calls out to him while filming. She sent him the money for vaccinations and to have him neutered and she set up her screensaver with a picture of the two of them, cheek to cheek, her son mimicking the pup’s panting tongue and half-blinked eyes, their noses thrust in the air. 
 
The dog circles her now, pulling the leash across her knees and he paws at the back of her thigh, leaving—she is certain—a long raised welt that may or may not leak blood. She is covered in scratches from his clawing demands. Thin-skinned Paw Paw fruits litter the ground around her, some split and oozing their yellow insides. She doesn’t like the looks of them and kicks one. The dog lunges after it, nearly buckling her when the leash catches on the back of her knees. She spins and untangles herself, pulls him back to her, puts him in a sit where he looks up to her, sorry to have disappointed her, and swishes his tail across the sand and pine needles. She pats his side and runs her hand over his sun-warmed head, cupping an ear to tell him he’s forgiven. 
 
The overdose, the first of what now amounted to three, had tipped her son over the edge of something. It was February and their plane was delayed for de-icing for so long she actually considered driving. But her husband said that was ridiculous—which it was—but she couldn’t just sit there, not going forward, not doing anything. They landed and walked out into sunshine so thin and bright it made her woozy. 
 
A crow is circling overhead now and it casts a distorted shadow across her and the dog before landing at the top of a twisted cypress. It cocks its head side to side, one eye at a time laser focused on the two of them. When it raises its head to caw and stretch its wings, the dog looks up to the branches and prances at the end of his leash, bows and then raises his own head with a long stretch of his neck and caws back at him, a strangled sound halfway between a growl and a yelp. His confusion makes her smile. He looks to her as if to say, do you see what I see? And she nods. It’s a crow, she says, as if she is teaching him a new word.
 
She expected remorse and apologies. She expected to tuck the hospital blankets around him and soothe him with a mother’s kiss to his forehead, feeling for a fever with her lips. She would smother him with her forgiveness, of course, of course! Instead he squared his face to theirs, his eyes flashing from one to the other of them over a wall of his own bitterness and denial.  There may have been some damage to the heart, the nurse had said. They were running tests. And he was still detoxing, which explained the film of sweat slicking his face and neck, the vomiting, and the smell that slunk from the bathroom. He said he was fine and just wanted to get out, go get his dog. He was agitated, drawing his legs to his chest and sliding them down again, twisting side to side, his mouth a thin, determined line. He scratched at the IV in his arm, threatening to pull it out. Don’t be stupid, her husband had said and glared at him until her husband had said Jesus, Jesus Christ, and looked away. She dug deep into her mother-arsenal to convince him to stay. When he was a child she constrained him with choices. He could have the apple, the fruit cup or the yogurt, but Gummy Bears weren’t an option, weren’t even on the list of offerings. He could stay at the hospital, go to rehab, come home with them. 
 
The first few days the dog was with her it would climb in her lap whenever she sat still, as if it could hold her down, all of its weight settled across her thighs and clunking the bridge of his nose up under her chin until she draped her arms over him and buried her face in the warm yeasty scent of his neck. Their last dog, an indifferent golden retriever, had been gone six years by now and this dog was nothing like the last. He wasn’t housetrained, for one thing, and left surprises in the study and one of the bathrooms—the one they never used anymore—and sometimes in her walk-in closet. She cleaned them up and didn’t complain. He is better now but still not to be trusted for long periods alone in the house. She tries not to leave him anyway if only because his howling is so pathetic. The whimpering starts as soon as he hears the gathering of her keys. 
 
While they kept vigil at the hospital she called rehab facilities that he swore he didn’t need but finally agreed to an outpatient program. He stayed two more days in the hospital but her husband had to get back east after the first night, after they knew that he would be okay. A counselor from the program came to his room before he was discharged. The young man who arrived was handsome in spite of—she couldn’t help thinking—the unfortunate and endless mesh of tattoos down his arms. He asked if he could speak to her son in private. When she returned her son was quiet, as if exhausted and worn down to the barest threads of himself. Of the man who fist bumped him on the way out the door, her son only looked at her and looked away. He’s cool, it’s okay, was all he said of him.
 
She stoops now to unhook the leash from the dog’s collar. He leaps to her face and slams a cold nose to her chin, licks and whimpers, dancing on his hind feet. She finally gets the leash unsnapped—the sliding mechanism sticks from the saltwater—and he is off, tearing down the path and kicking sand and pinecones in his wake. He skids halfway down to the right side of the path, distracted, and dives into the cattails, his tail wagging hard so she can track him by the whipping stalks. She starts to yell out to him, afraid he has come upon a water moccasin or a muskrat, or a rotting bag of chicken necks that he will devour and throw up again, but he breaks from the brush and flies to the tip of the peninsula where he splashes into the shallow water and flops down to his belly so that just his head and black rump rise above the water like a sea dragon. When he stands again to shake he sends up glittering scatters of water. It is so beautiful, the drops backlit in the rising sun, rhythmic sprays of shimmer from his shaking body, that she feels a catch in her chest, as if she is witnessing something ethereal.
 
She was hopeful, as they drove home from the hospital. He needed to get his phone so he could call his friend, the guy who called 911 when he had the accident in his apartment. He needed to call him and find out where he lived so he could get his dog back. He missed the dog, he said. It was his best friend and he hadn’t seen it in three days now. He was going to spend more time with it and take it hiking more and the counselor had said he could even bring the dog to the meetings. Things are different in California, he explained. Dogs can go a lot more places. People aren’t so uptight here. Definitely, things would be better with him and the dog. He’s good for me, he said. He’ll keep me accountable, you know, when you have to be responsible for another living thing. She wondered why he didn’t feel accountable to her but shrugged it off with a flinch of her shoulder. 
 
She watches the dog spin in circles in the water. A line of honking geese skim the surface and then, perhaps spying the dog, lift again in a perfect dashed sweep. She picks up a beer can, dumps the sludge from it. She will drop it in a neighbor’s trashcan on the walk back. She squeezes it in her grip so that it makes a tinny pop-snap and collapses in her hand. The dog comes to the shore, squares himself with her as she comes down the path and barks once to hurry her along before darting into a mesh of Bayberry shrubs. A large cedar has come down over the winter and pulled its massive roots from the ground so that they rise like an arc of twisted horns through the bramble of the shrubs. The tree stretches twenty feet or more into the water and debris has caught in the branches, plastic bags, a milk jug, marsh grasses, tangles of translucent fishing line, pine cones. The dog scrambles from the underbrush and up on to the wide trunk of the tree and walks the length of it out over the water until he is blocked by branches further along. He pivots like a balancing circus dog and runs back down to where the roots rise. The uprooting has left a waterlogged hole in the earth. 
 
When they got back to her son’s apartment he was quick to explain that the place was probably a mess. Maybe she should wait outside. He just needed to grab his phone and then they could go get the dog. They stood outside the apartment door and she only nodded. But as soon as he opened it she followed him in. A small raspy yelp came from his bedroom. All he said was, what the fuck. 
 
The dog has leapt down to the upturned roots of the tree and she can see its back end, tail stiff and high, not wagging. There is a short deep bark and then a snarling and she begins to run down the path. She can see him stepping back and lunging forward, once, twice, before he disappears from sight and there is a thrashing and gnashing that almost stops her, so afraid she is of what she will be witness to. A cat, maybe, or a fox, and please, she says aloud, not a heron. She keeps running, reminding herself to be cautious about what she is willing to get in the middle of but then suddenly terrified that he has taken on something he will lose to. There have been sightings of coyote, but she never believed it. She has heard they hunt in packs. Her neighbor won’t let his cats out at night. 
 
The pup crawled on its belly and whimpered its way to the threshold of her son’s bedroom door, then stood, wide legged and wobbly, tail tucked between its legs, and staggered to her son who swooped him in his arms. Two metal bowls were overturned on the kitchen floor, bone dry. The pup heaved in his arms and let out a long loose cry, flicking the tip of its tongue to her son’s chin. What the fuck, what the fuck. She grabbed a bowl from the floor and ran water into it at the sink. A hoard of fruit flies rose from the pile of crusted dishes. The dog was placed at the bowl and drank in huge sloppy gulps until his belly bloated and the bowl was dry again. Her son lifted it to her and asked her to fill it again but she said no, wait, it’s too much. It will make him sicker. Her son sat beside the dog on the floor and it crawled into his lap, silently, but lifting its head to look at him and then dropping it again. She noticed now, he wasn’t neutered. She found a bag of dog food on the counter that was nearly empty and took out a small handful, put it in her son’s hand. That fucker, her son said, shaking his head back and forth. How could he just leave my dog? The dog nosed the food in his hand but dropped his head away, the caramel brows falling down its face. She sat down on the floor next to her son, thought of running her hand down his back and thought better of it. They both stroked the dog’s head and back instead, their hands bumping one another.  He hunched over the dog and apologized over and over again, cursing his friend. She looked around the room and saw the piles of dried dog shit near the base of a floor lamp so she rose and got a roll of paper towels and peeled them up from the carpet, dropped them in a plastic shopping bag on the counter and knotted the handles. Maybe the dog had been drinking from the toilet, but she saw that the bathroom door was shut. They should take him to the vet, she said. He was weak and she was watching his belly inflate. He threw up the water without even rising off of her son’s lap, barely lifting his head to gag quietly and let water flood over her son’s thighs.
 
The dog is thrashing now and growling and just as she is only a few yards from him, he backs from the undergrowth with a monstrously large possom in his mouth, whipping and snapping his head. She throws the beer can in her hand at him and it bounces off of his rump. Screaming for him to let go she watches in horror as tiny pink mounds of flesh and fur are scattered from the possom’s body. She grabs the dog by his collar and twists it, choking him to make him let go, pulling his front feet off the ground. She cannot bear to see what damage he has done to this creature, what parts of it have flung off into the underbrush.  He finally lets go and drops it, thunk, to the ground, reaches out with a paw as if to reclaim it, grey-white fur fluffing from the dog’s mouth and trailing tongue. The possom is still, bright spots of blood on its side and its mouth frozen in a snarl. She ties the dog to a sapling at some distance where he cries and leaps at the end of the leash so hard that the tree bows and shimmies.
 
The pup was weak, his breath shallow, a heartbeat barely discernable. He was going into shock, the vet said, and they would start him on fluids right away. On the drive back, her son sobbed and tossed his head back and forth from his chest to the headrest of her rental car as they headed to the apartment to wait. There was nothing else to do. It was out of their hands now, she reminded him. Two days later the dog was ready to be released. She had spent the time cleaning the apartment, shampooing the carpets, stocking the cupboards, and her son had spent his days at outpatient counseling. She texted him to tell him they could pick up the dog together when he got home but he texted back, asking her to go and get him now. He would be walking right past the pet store on his way home. He would bring dog food and some new toys for him, maybe a new collar. Could she transfer just a few dollars into his account? She was happy to do it and took a moment with her phone to make the transfer. Fifty dollars would be more than enough but when she checked his balance he was overdrawn. She covered the overdraft and added a cushion that would last a few weeks. He would need to get a job if he didn’t go back to school, but of course, he would go back to school. He could start back up slowly with a summer course or two. He was only eighteen credits shy of graduation and had only missed the one semester. They were so close to getting back on track. 
 
She turns back to the possom, the dog simpering behind her and finally settling anxiously on his belly, his front legs stretched out long from his body towards her, pawing. She tells him to shut up. She never told her children to shut up. She always checked herself and said be quiet instead. And sometimes, for the love of God, please be quiet. It was something she was careful about, her choice of words. 
 
All around her, and other than the dog’s whining, an eerie quiet has sifted down. The world has halted to reconcile with this savagery. She bends over the animal, a grotesque marvel with a long naked tail and wiry fur, a raw pink nose and the mouth drawn back in that snarl revealing razor-sharp incisors yellowed at the roots.  There are no tears in the flesh other than the two puncture wounds on the shoulder that she assumes, if she were to turn it over, would be matched on the other side. The bites must be deep, insidious, barely perceptible because it is surely dead. The thrashing in the dog’s mouth must have broken its neck, or the dog’s teeth punctured the animal’s heart and—good god—there is a viscous green mucus leaking half the length of its tail and puddling like lava at the back end. She can smell it, something like sulfur and the rotting of once green grass. She looks back at the dog and thinks she hates him right now. Hates everything about him. His tongue slaps in and out of his mouth to rid it of clumps of fur. He drops his chin to the ground. Bits of fur cling to his nose.
 
She texted him at 4:30 to tell him they were waiting for him. The dog looked great, was happy to be home and she had dinner started. The dog followed her from room to room, even into the bathroom where it stood in the doorway and watched her with his head cocked and those brows lifted. When she stood at the kitchen sink it curled up on her feet with a sigh and she allowed it, tried not to move from the spot until finally, she had to put the glassware away and so she scooped him from her feet and held him like a baby with one hand while she emptied the dishwasher. By seven, she had sent him a dozen texts and called him three or more times. A sickness was rooting in her stomach. She closed the blinds because she didn’t want to watch the night fall, didn’t want to see the streetlights click on, didn’t want to think that this sunny hopeful day was slipping away. 
 
She is standing over the possum and she cannot help but touch it. The fur is softer than she expected. She holds the palm of her hand to its side and imagines there is a small rise and fall to it—no, she is mistaken—maybe just the release of a last breath after death. She has heard of that, of gases shifting in a body after death so that there is that last snag of a miracle tripping over despair. She thinks for just the briefest second that this is a possum playing possum, but that would be too easy. Suddenly, she hears small movements in the underbrush and sounds, like tiny whispered sneezes, rising up around her. She jumps to her feet and spies, only a few feet away, a small rat-like creature only a mere two inches long with a curled reptilian tail and a sheer dusting of fur over a pink body. It crawls on its belly with its small legs splayed, lifting its head and swinging it side-to-side with a breezy chirp. She looks around her and sees the carpet of leaves and pine moving all around her. They are everywhere, five, six, seven or more tiny little creatures, as if the ground is coming alive with strange hatchlings. She picks up the one closest to her, holds it between her hands like a prayer. The eyes are open, just barely. The claws tickle the heels of her hand. The nose lifts in the air between her thumbs. She is at a loss. They are everywhere, eight, nine…
 
She is angry with him, angrier than she has ever been, for the wreckage, the carnage, the loss of life—of lives— the destruction all around her. For his savagery. For the pathetic way he whimpers at her now. For his neediness, for the way her wrist hurts and the tendonitis in her elbow. She is angry with herself for letting him loose, for trusting him, and for the way the watery blink of his eyes never fails to catch at the most tender part of herself. 
 
She puts the tiny creature in her hands down to the ground beside its mother, watches him cling and climb upon her, nosing into her fur, and she reaches for another. As if she can put it all back together—and what else can she do? Just what is expected of her?
 
Oh, she is angry, angered by his shocking disregard for others, his selfishness. Angry for the way he has thrashed her heart and refused to listen, to obey. Angry for the way that wishing has eaten holes in her head and jolted her awake at night, for the raw space it has left in her so that it hurts to be touched by any sort of kindness.
 
She looks back to the dog, meaning to send him her hardest glare, her harshest rebukes, but there is that damp blink, that promise that things could change, that nothing lasts forever.
 
And there is that hope hitching in her heart again, blowing through her lungs and making her suck in a deep breath, slash the tears from her face, and gather the scattered remains around her. 

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Shawn is the co-founder of Love In The Trenches (LITT), a non-profit foundation that supports parents of those afflicted with addiction through support groups, education and resources.  Loveinthetrenches.org Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Smokelong Quarterly, Five-on-the Fifth, Literary Mama, and she has a debut novel releasing from Blackstone Publishing in 2021. Currently she is finishing her MA in Writing at Johns Hopkins this semester. Follow her on Twitter @shawn_nocher

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