My father used to drown family dogs in the lake on our property. When the dog would get too old, beyond its years of usefulness, he would take it on one last walk across the fields.
He was not a cruel or punitive man; when asked, my father would explain that the reason he did what he did was that “the old boy’s taking up space and don’t do nothin’ for us anymore” and “we only got so much and can’t afford to waste a thing” and “it’s better to put it out of its misery.”
“If we got a new puppy, what would it eat? Where would it sleep?” He’d say.
Rationale aside, I never slept well the night after a drowning.
Every drowning was the same, almost ritualistic.…
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Mornings, Penelope awakes to an inexplicable pain in her thighs, as if her legs have been stretched in opposite directions. Nights, she is convinced the loneliness will swallow her, but, like the morning aches, the feeling fades when she rouses herself from bed.
On her mantle is a picture of one of her two children, a daughter, smiling reluctantly, face blotched with pimply youth. She keeps Jeanine encapsulated in her picture frame, frozen in time, seven years prior. Mitchell has earned nothing more than one small photo from high school graduation, tucked into her wallet.
Nighttime, her children are very real to her. She wonders if Mitchell, that rambunctious child always running, the winds stirring in his passage and blowing her taxes off the kitchen table, has finally settled down.…
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Last night she looked me in the eye and told me she’d do anything I wanted, go anywhere I wanted. Before sunrise she tried to stab herself in the belly with a little knife. Not the sharpest knife in the place – but still. I had to hold her down for a while.
“Honeybee, we can’t keep doing this,” I say. “We have to stop.”
We are sitting on the floor at the miniature table in Charlie’s room. We are too big for the white chairs. We don’t want to break them, even now. You might not think we’d be in that room, but it is the most comfortable place to sit. It has the softest carpet, anyway.
“We’re no good, babe,” she says. “I feel like we should just die.”…
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It’s twilight, and you’re walking with a dog. Your dog. Perhaps the dog, the combination of all the dogs you’ve loved in your life: the golden retriever who destroyed your Barbie dolls when you were a child, the wild wire-haired terrier you adopted as soon as you graduated from college, the beagle you got after your divorce.
The dog runs free, loping ahead of you, returning without hesitation when you call. This is the kind of park that allows dogs to run free, making easy circles under the trees.
It’s twilight, and it’s one of the shoulder seasons, perhaps early fall or perhaps late spring. The air is warm, humid enough to feel soft. Somewhere there’s the scent of flowers. Somewhere there’s a hint of music.…
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Obama hits on the Swedish Prime Minister. She’s got that ofay blonde hair and her legs go on forever. They’re not really longer than Michelle’s, but Big O’s gotten caught up in the celebration of Mandela’s death. He’s let his hair down and slid into his African self, as if he’d taken a few good draughts of nitrous oxide or absinthe drinks loaded with wormwood, as if he’d torn pieces of Ethiopian spiced goat meat off a larger hunk with his sharp teeth. All the goat meat in the world, he thinks, is his. He’s the most powerful man in the world. He can eat and drink as much as he likes. He can blow up to be as fat as a deposed dictator.
Big O is looking for a slam dunk.…
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You and I took the old Jetta out there years ago. We drove into the sunset because you couldn’t wait for morning. On the drive over, you bounced your leg up and down and pointed out each color—the orange hue that turned pink, like the jars of powder you mixed to lemonade. I reached over and touched your thigh to steady it. You calmed. You wrapped your hand around mine. It felt soft, small. Your skin looked pale against my own, tinted red. The radio played old love songs, lyrics I didn’t know. I smiled when you belted out each word loudly, with confidence. You didn’t care that you sounded like a screeching cat when you missed the high notes. And neither did I. My memory often recreates your voice as flawless. …
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He’d been sawing on her abdomen like a sadistic carpenter for what seemed like hours. As she lay on the table, motionless, afraid to move or make a sound, he dumped the acidic liquid over the bloody slash in her gut. It would’ve scorched her pale, tender skin if she hadn’t gone numb from the waist down several hours ago. What the hell was that? Vinegar?
She’d always been a conscientious person; treated people the way she’d want to be treated, got a college education, paid her taxes. She would never understand what she had done to deserve this outcome. As she’d busied herself with cleaning her apartment and finishing her dissertation on the failings of modern feminism in America earlier that afternoon, she had the feeling that someone was observing her. …
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