Lindsay Hunter

Mrs. Mitchell said she’d seen the dog walking along the sidewalk just that morning. “It looked kinda pitiful,” she said, running a finger under her nose. “Like it couldn’t decide if it should walk forward or back.”

“Did you try to stop her?” I asked, the words tumbling out like ice from a dropped cup.

“Well, I was in the middle of something,” Mrs. Mitchell said. Then she formed her mouth into the shape of a casserole dish and whispered, “I was nude.”

The dog was medium sized. Angular. Her black fur shone under certain light. Her breath smelled of turds and, perplexingly, applesauce. She was not affectionate; if her tongue flicked the end of your nose when you leaned in close she looked put out, embarrassed, violated. She’d been our dog for seven-almost-eight years. I’d had a dream two nights ago that I’d cradled her in the moonlight, and tenderly watched as she nursed from my breast. Don’t tell me those things, my husband grumbled, his groggy breath smelling of turds and garlic. I was thirty-three weeks pregnant. We often called the dog the baby.

“She’s gone,” I said, but I hiccupped in the middle. The phone felt oily against my face and I envisioned the wet wipe I’d steal from the nursery to run over the screen, how the smudges would vanish, how it would feel clean and new again. Wouldn’t I be a good mother?

“Who.” I could hear my husband typing, could tell he was breathing with his mouth open, his tongue pulsing with each click of a key.

“The baby,” I said, and I couldn’t help the fissure breaking through my voice, its promise of damp, of sad. “That idiot next door said she saw her on the sidewalk but didn’t do anything about it because she was naked.”

My husband breathed.

“Nude, is the word she used, I mean.”

“Um,” my husband said. His attention was elsewhere. Quickly, I imagined the porn he might frequent while in his office. Women vacuuming in string underwear. Women, topless, stirring batter in brightly colored bowls. Women on their backs, smiling cheerfully at the ceiling tiles, while a man efficiently pumped and then wiped.

“The baby,” I said again. “I can’t find her.”

“You’re not making any sense,” he said, as if I were to blame for his poor conversational skills. I pictured his mother, her eager bird wrists, her choppy hair, the time she apologized to a houseplant for bumping into it. I had no sympathy for mothers; hide that, hide it.

The dog loved her food. I always mixed wet in with the dry. My husband gagged at the smell so it was always me. I took pride, you can take that to the bank. She made eye contact like a person. She had tiny bottom teeth, like a row of seed pearls. I often pulled her lip down to get a glimpse. Her back toes were white. On occasion, she ate her own stool, chewing quickly and looking over her shoulder as if others were waiting for a taste.

“I’ll figure it out,” I said to my husband. The phone was hot and slick; I could smell the familiar scent of my own makeup. What was more recognizable to a woman, I wondered: the smell of her makeup, or the smell of her vagina?

“Figure what out? Dinner? I want burgers.”

“Can do,” I said, and I pressed the bright red dot that released us both. And then I went into the backyard and removed the lid on the compost and pushed my phone deep into its marshy slime. I brushed a few pale broccoli florets over its grave and replaced the lid. It’s important not to think too deeply about one’s motivations. I felt glad about the coffee grinds under my fingernails; it gave me something to do, should the need arise.

It wasn’t easy to walk in my state. Rather, it wasn’t easy to walk in any sort of alluring or attractive way, unless one found penguins sexy. Still, I pushed on, waddling to the corner and then past it, out of breath by the time I reached the next stop sign, but persisting still. I said the dog’s name, loud and then louder. The neighborhood elementary school was letting out for the day, children scattering from its doors like cockroaches in the light.

“My dog,” I murmured over their heads. “Have you seen her? She loves children.”

I rubbed my bump in the customary way. I am mother; I am motherly. My shirt was clinging to my skin; I’d applied cocoa butter that morning and it had never absorbed. Was I doing it wrong?

The dog liked to put her snout directly onto my areola and heave in, snorting on the exhale. My husband had no idea, per his request.

“I know you,” a boy said. A thick clump of hair was sticking up in back. I had the urge to smooth it down but instead I smoothed my own hair; did that mean something? My hair was thick, so unlike the hair I’d had all my life, which was drifty and thin and impossible to toss. I tossed it now; I believed the boy adequately took in and appreciated the move.

“You do?”

“Yeah. You’re the lady with the stuff at the thing.”

“I am?”

“Yeah.” He squinted and his lip curled up and I saw that he was missing a tooth, that the other front tooth had come in huge and blocky, a real problem for him until his face could catch up. “I know things.”

Another child approached, letting fly a taut rubber band directly into the boy’s cheek. He cried immediately, loudly and wetly.

“Why’d you do that?” he asked. The other child had run off, was either the one hugging a doughy lady or the one picking his nose and wiping it on the bark of a tree.

“Me?”

But he didn’t answer, was being led away by a man in a lanyard, who peered back over his shoulder at me. The sun was flashing in his glasses, so I couldn’t tell what I was in his eyes.

I trundled along. I saw the dog in every shadow. I passed a tree that looked climbable, even for a four-legged animal who didn’t like her paws to get mucky. When she barked, you knew what the word worry would sound like were it a sound and not a word. I listened for anything nervous. A busy road was approaching. I mean I was the one approaching it. The cars passed and I timed my breaths to each one and we breathed together, me and the cars filled with strangers. I’d excelled at moderating my breaths, had never admitted to the instructor that it made me feel light-headed, laden with dread, out of myself. Perhaps that was the point.

My heart was another issue. Like a well-shod foot stomping down, down. The baby could run fast but what does that matter to a car?

I brought a phantom cell phone up to my ear. It felt nice, nurturing, to have my hand at my face in that way.

It’s okay, the instructor told us, scratching the pit behind her knee, to hate your child for a time. I’d raised my hand to ask a follow-up but was not called upon.

The wind in the trees sounded like a massive bead curtain being swept aside.

What if we feel nothing at all? was the question.

I spotted the baby, sunning herself in a stranger’s yard. Just beyond the chain link fence, so rusted and old that it emitted a sound instead of a color. She was playing with a toy, something furry. Batting it with her paws, as if she were a cat. In fact I’d often had to remind myself that she was a dog and not some other thing. Like a bat, or a baby. I pocketed the cell; I had no pocket but did that matter? I said the baby’s name and she looked over. Three things happened at once:

Something inside me began punching up.

The neighbor’s door flew open and then slammed shut, trapping the neighbor; a white face appeared in its window and I felt burdened by the face’s expression. Horror, or rage?

And, I realized the baby had mauled a kitten.

“My husband,” I called toward the face. “I can’t get a hold of my husband.” Bits of fur were clinging to the baby’s whiskers. She yawned and her teeth were sunset pink. I could see one of the kitten’s eyes was dangling, that it had been an orange tabby. Its tongue lolled. The baby pushed at it with her paws and then stretched, offering up her pale belly, so trusting. “Good girl,” I said, out of habit. The kitten was in the shape of an S. I had no urge to run to it, was that normal?

The neighbor was a boy, a teenager. I watched his mouth making shapes. His shoulders were broad and his neck was sturdy; he was attractive.

Perhaps the question should have been, What if I feel too much?

The teenager was rough with the baby, lifting her by her scruff and nearly throwing her over the fence into my arms. I caught her, a credit in that column.

Dumb, he seemed to be saying at me. You are a dumb woman.

“Me?”

The baby writhed in my arms, desperate for her kitten. Her paws scrabbled at my throat; my swollen belly throbbed, as if it were a whacked gong. I looked up to see the teenager was demanding something of me.

My teeth chattered. Something wet was occurring in my lower half; I felt shattered on the inside. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to hold on, or let the baby go.

“She loves it,” I said to the boy, pointing with my chin at the mound of blood and fur and bone at his feet. “That’s just how she shows her love.”