It is hardly summer, and I am barely twenty-one but there is
a snake squirming in the grass. In my memory, it is long and vibrant, thicker
than my fist, but I’ve seen mice I thought were rats before. I screamed and had
terrible dreams of the supposed rats biting my little dog, so I trapped them in
hot sticky glue and regretted it when I saw their tiny flinching bird muscles
rustle against the velvet of their fur, dusty with a thousand lives’ legacies
beneath the refrigerator. I didn’t do it once, I did it maybe three times, sick
with guilt and then I started cleaning properly the mice scuttled away, back to
their corners, along with the roaches. I am always sick with guilt. My little
dog is always matting behind his ears. He has long, lusicious lion hair that’s
fine and silky. Matts are a sign of neglect, as are his long, curling nails. I’m
not neglecting them—they worry and burrow, those sharp nails and blunted knots,
into my mind all the time, but nothing is as easy as we assume. I keep trying
to cut the nails but he yowls and screams and I cut too deep and he bleeds and
bleeds.” I’m not hurting you, I’m helping you,” I want to say, but I can’t so I
become his monster, and after-all, sometimes I really do hurt him.
So the nails are a
stalemate—we have stopped for now and he wears them long and I hope he will
grind them down on the hot pavement. The matting won’t go away though. I itch
at them compulsively, and I look at them in wonder. His hair is deep amber, and
it glows red and dusty in the late May sunlight. They are little nebulas—tangled
and feathered and dense and magnificent. I snip them with scissors while he
sleeps and throw them in the trash—the cosmos goes out of them and they are
just dirty hair. I check him over and over for snake-bites. I hold his little
chest to my ear and listen to his stomach gurgle and hope for his heart. He is
angry at me and lurks beneath the couch and the bed, growling and grimacing and
grinding his little teeth on the raw-hide.
I cut my other dog’s hair off with an electric razor because
it is 80 degrees out and he looks like an overgrown mountain goat. I try to use
the razor guard but nothing comes off, so I use the razor and am ashamed when I
am done, afraid that I have hurt him. He has curdled little matts too, behind
his ears. I try to keep up but it is hard. I cut one off and it leaves a deep
cut that I find the next day. I feel sick to my stomach and circle into a haze
of pus and death. My dogs are always dying in my mind. It makes me sick because
I am always going to be the one who kills them. My mother says to put Neosporin
in it and I hide behind her words, hoping if I just do what she says, he will
be alright. He always is, but I can’t shake that fear. I cut my own hair with
blunt fabric scissors, a little off the ends. It is uneven in the back.
Despite the snakes, and ticks, I let him run through the
tall grass. He is so happy, and later I am so afraid. I rummage around his
armpits, inside his ears. He carries home burrs and long hot sticky pieces of
grass and huge glowing gobs of mud as if they are trophies he has pinned on for
life. I work them out slowly and sometimes I cut them out, leaving emptiness
behind. They go in the trash with the dog hair and plastics and dirty paper towels.
He lunges at cars, tears at the sidewalk. He would bleed to bite the wind. He
is very bright outside, flashing and dashing, one step away from setting fire
to the forest with his teeth. But he turns soft with me, rolling on his back
and sighing in my ear at night or nuzzling his chin against my hip bone. Sometimes,
I wonder if he if he is very brave or very afraid. I wonder if he knows that he
makes me both. I wake up sometimes and
get frightened when I don’t think I can see his ribs swaying, and I grope for
his heart with sleepy, urgent fingers, my arm a pale snake wriggling in the
dark.
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