Soooooooo like everyone else has been doing, I decided to post my short story. The first draft plus a few changes. And I will put up the final draft later, I guess.
Dog
I used to know the girl with the most loyal dog in the world. Natalie. She lived down the street from me. Her dog was clever and did everything right—no one questioned his ability, and everyone commented on his flawlessness.
Lucky, right?
I thought so. I was jealous. But you would be, too, if you’d been collecting lucky pennies all your life and all your dog did was make Mom mad by marking territory on the side of the TV. But I don’t believe in luck anymore. I quit picking up pennies off the ground ages ago.
Nat’s dog was named Dog. Just Dog. She used to tell me it was because Dog wasn’t simply any dog. He was the dog. The ultimate.
Sure thing, I thought. Dog spelled backwards is God.
Nat had a way with being loud and proud about everything. I suppose it was her way of being a sixth-grade rebel with no friends other than Dog and a shrimpy kid always looking at the ground. Me.
~~~~~~~
The herd of sixth graders sits awkwardly on the floor of the classroom in a lumpy semblance of a circle. Amongst them sits their young teacher, leaning forward, her eyes rolling excitedly in an attempt to look at all of them at the same time.
“Now, since we’re all new to middle school and so many of us are new to each other,” she gushes, “we’re going to play a little game to get to know each other!”
Somewhere at the far end of the circle a student sneezes worriedly; another’s hand darts quickly to her face to scratch her chin and darts quickly back, hoping desperately that the teacher hasn’t noticed her fidgeting.
Clapping her hands together ecstatically, Ms. Rolf continues. “I want each of you to tell us your name and something special about you!”
The class is overwhelmed by Ms. Rolf’s originality. Reluctantly, it begins to torture itself, one student at a time, as the rest of the students use their stares to paint the speaker into a shade more red than the apple earrings dangling spastically along the sides of Ms. Rolf’s head. It’s a painfully slow process until, finally, two students remain—a stout girl with a slight upturn to her nose and a skinny one timidly tracing four-leaf clover patterns into the patch of carpet next to her. The first shakes her sunny locks out of her face in preparation for her big announcement.
“I’m Natalie,” she puffs proudly. “I just moved here, and I’m interesting because I have the best dog in the world.”
The class remains untouched, unimpressed. The students are restless, looking outside, distracted.
“That’s wonderful, Natalie!” Ms. Rolf’s watery eyes make her look like she’s about to cry from the excitement. Beside her, Skinny stops tracing patterns and scoots a bit away from her just in case she does.
Sighing when she realizes it’s her turn, Skinny whispers, “I’m Elizabeth?” and her voice trails off like her fingers, which stray erratically across the carpet. She doesn’t finish her introduction, but it doesn’t matter. No one is paying attention.
Elizabeth sits on the short, wooden fence. It’s a relief, she thinks, that school is over for the day. She lets her eyes wander, goggling at the huge eighth graders standing as a mob a few feet over, until her eyes rest comfortably back where they’re always looking—the patch of ground by her feet.
“Why’re you always looking at your feet?”
Elizabeth looks up to see an eyebrow-wrinkling, wide-eyed Natalie sitting on the bit of fence next to her.
“I’m not looking at my feet,” squeaks Elizabeth, offended. “I’m looking at the ground!” Proving her point, Elizabeth quickly looks back down at the ground, as if to make sure it’s still there.
Natalie’s eyes open a little wider, but she says nothing, and turns her eyes solemnly to the patch of ground by her own feet occasionally attempting conversation.
“You never finished your introduction today.”
Elizabeth returns a blank stare.
“For Ms. Rolf’s class,” Natalie continues, awkwardly. Elizabeth’s lack of cooperation is a bit unnerving. “What was your special fact?”
“I like looking at the ground,” says Elizabeth, unconcerned. Elizabeth doesn’t particularly care what Natalie thinks of her. Most people don’t think anything of her. She just says the first thing that comes to mind and starts making marks in the grass with the tip of her sneakers.
“R-really?!...Why?”
Natalie sounds more worried than curious. The conversation starts and stops, with her doing most of the talking, up until Natalie’s mother pulls up to the curb. With a wave and a “Bye!” Natalie jumps up suddenly, grabs her backpack, and flees to the blue van with a large golden retriever beating a window with its tail in the back.
Elizabeth watches the van drive away and turns back to the ground. The front entrance of the school is suddenly much quieter than she thought. I look at the ground, she wants to say, because when I pay attention to it, it gives me things I like. She’s an unlucky kid, with an unlucky problem with saying the things she wants to say. And all unlucky kids need to constantly gather lucky things to counteract their unluckiness. Such important charms are all found by looking at the ground—pennies to collect, four-leaf clovers to pick, cracks in the sidewalk to jump over. And today, someone willing to talk to her.
~~~~~~~
Nat and Dog were always matching. Similar golden hair, similar warm eyes, and in a way, similar smile. I remember this one photo—one of the last photos—the summer after eighth grade, of the three of us on Nat’s front porch, with me on the left, Dog in the middle, and her on the right. It was taken close enough that you can tell Nat had a single, yellow canine in an otherwise flawless, white smile, and Dog had one pearl jammed between rows of kibble-stained teeth—a delicate, undersized thing. I always felt like pulling out the two misfits and switching their places. Their personalities were like their smiles, I think—one half incomplete without the other. Dog was compliant, quiet in a way that made you wonder what thoughts were lingering in that furry head of his. Nat almost never shut up, so I knew what she was thinking just about as soon as she opened her mouth, which was fine by me, since I didn’t say much myself.
That summer was really hot. The kind of hot where everyone shuts themselves in to keep in the precious breeze of their air conditioning. And if everyone was shutting themselves in, Nat was sticking it out in the heat outdoors, and Dog and I were following suit, snooping around the garden out in front and occasionally wandering out into the sidewalk by Nat’s house. I don’t even know what exactly we were doing, standing out in the sun like that, each with a cone-full of drippy ice cream. I just remember looking at the ground, looking closely at the web of cracks sluicing the sun-bleached sidewalk as Nat alternated between babbling on about how high school was going to be the ultimate and goofing off with Dog, who was doing everything she asked him to, as usual. And right then, I saw it, contrasting brilliantly against the dusty concrete.
A lucky penny—shining, head-side up, 1996. I paused to do some figuring in my head. By this time, I wasn’t just finding luck in objects. I processed numbers like a calculator, and there were lucky digits everywhere. 1 plus 9 plus 9 plus 6. Twenty-five. 2 plus 5. Seven. Seven! A good number. This is one lucky, lucky, penny. Whistling at my copper miracle, I started bending down to grab it.
Too bad.
With a splat, my cone fell, its spilt guts covering up my prize, ‘cause right then, Nat started screaming her head off.
~~~~~~~
“Sit? Stay…High five! Shake hands, nice to meet you. Speak—what did you say? Oh yes, I understand. Down, up, turn around: and Bang! You’re dead. Good job! Good job. I love you, you silly, silly dog.”
It’s their standard routine. Dog goes through the motions. Fluid. Expert. Intelligent. He is all of these. Natalie laughs as she turns towards Elizabeth, to chirp some quibble. Something about “high school.”
Behind her, Dog lies down on the warm grass, resting his head on a large patch of weeds. Something doesn’t rest quite well with him. Why did she always want him dead? Dying on command is hard to do. But Natalie always seems pleased with the job he does. Dog strikes a pose, lying sideways, still and frozen on the baked soil, waiting for Natalie’s next words.
Good job! Good job—The performance always ends there.
A surprised Elizabeth looks up from her spot in the grass, answering Natalie’s question slowly, deliberately. She’s promptly blown over with bits of grass as the ever-moving Natalie barks a haughty laugh and runs into the house to grab something. As they wait, Elizabeth sits quietly, a bit sleepily, contemplating Dog in her quiet way. She imagines something doesn’t rest quite well with him.
Good job! Good job. With Natalie’s magic words, Dog always completes his red-letter performance, unfreezing, getting up, wagging his tail, and laughing his soft, wheezy dog-laugh. But maybe she is wrong about that. Maybe everyone who chuckles along with Dog is all wrong about that. As she looks at him, she thinks, Dog is always sighing.
She shakes the thoughts from her head as Natalie stumbles out with two ice creams and an extra cone for Dog. She hold out the sticky, sweet cone over his head.
“Sit? Stay…High five! Nice to meet you. What’s your name—what did you say? Oh yes, that’s wonderful. Down, up, turn around: and Bang! Play dead. Good job! Good job. I love you, you silly, silly dog.”
This time, the show doesn’t end.
Perhaps it’s just the right amount of heat, or just the right flavor of ice cream, just the right time, just the right place on the raspy, bitter grass. But Dog’s finally done it. Somehow, he’s pulled it off, his soul shreds apart from his body. He works to impress.
“Dog? Dog! DOG! WAKE UP!”
Dog looks at Natalie. She looks like she’s yelling, but she’s facing an empty carcass in the grass, shaking it desperately, and he can’t hear her very well. He ducks his head, confused, and looks at his body, which trembles loosely, limply, in the sunlight, with the limbs bent at all the wrong angles.
Elizabeth darts over, wild-eyed, rushing past Dog, and stopping instead next to his corpse. Her ice cream lies abandoned on the sidewalk, screaming strawberry pink in shocking, harsh sunlight that dissolves it down to nothing. Elizabeth, too, begins to scream, and soon enough, the neighbors are flocking to Natalie’s house to see what all the alarm and commotion are about. No one notices the light breeze that carries away Dog’s soul like he’s a feather, and before he knows it, Dog’s drifted off, too far away from his own body for him to be able to do anything about it.
~~~~~~~
After Dog died, ninth grade started out a disaster. It was Ms. Rolf all over again, the same-lame-name-game, a repeat of all the wondering, all of the thoughts—why am I special?
Except Dog was gone, and Nat was left just as clueless as I was about what made a person special.
She was at the desk next to mine. “I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.
I thought about it, doodling a clover on a corner of my desk, and shrugged. I didn’t know what she would say either. I didn’t even know what I was going to say.
“Well,” I ended up saying, “You can’t say anything about Dog, can you? We should both probably make something up.”
Bad answer. I knew it before I was even done speaking. The sentence ended lamely, weakly—trailing off higher and higher until even bats couldn’t have understood what I was saying. I’d messed up, again. I could tell by the way she smiled and agreed. The way she laughed asserted, yes, the only the thing that makes me special is that my dog died on command.
I shut my mouth. No matter how many clovers I drew, I was always saying the wrong thing. No matter how many cracks in the sidewalk I’d avoided, Dog was dead. No matter how many pennies I collected, I was bad at having friends. And no matter how long I waited for the clock to read 11:11, nothing was going to change on its own.
I wiped the clover with my thumb, making a dark smear on the surface of the desk. Luck. Screw you.
Eventually, in the middle of the year, Nat moved out of state. At that point, I still wasn’t much of a talker. We called each other off and on, but nothing was the same when there was a certain taboo on talking about Dog. Later on, the calls trailed off, and we lost track of each other completely. The last time I called, I ended up hanging up on a strange man informing me I’d dialed the wrong number.
~~~~~~~
Elizabeth is standing in line at the university bookstore. When it is her turn, she steps up brightly to the cashier and places her space engineering textbooks on the counter. While the books are rung up, she chatters excitedly about nothing in particular, talking for the sake of talking. It’s what she’s observed most people doing when they wait for their purchases, and she has gotten surprisingly good at it. As she pauses to take a sip from her morning coffee, the value of her due change catches her eye: four cents. She flinches and reaches over, past the counter, to grab her bag of books before the cashier can hand it to her. “It’s fine, keep the change!” she calls over her shoulder. She strides quickly out, leaving a startled cashier holding out four shining copper pieces behind her. Elizabeth can’t help but be a little disturbed, but before long the pennies are cleared from her mind, and she’s occupied with making her way back to her dorm.
Progressing down the busy sidewalk, Elizabeth squints high up at the towering skyscrapers, marveling at their airy grace in this big city she has immersed herself into. She has no time to keep track of the millions of cracks in the worn cement that she has just tread. The world above her fascinates her; an utter contrast to the world beneath her feet that she grew to know so well in her clover-picking days. And when nighttime falls, Elizabeth’s eyes don’t leave the sky. Instead, they look higher, farther, at far more beautiful things than the buildings she admires in the daytime.
Tonight, despite the sweltering heat, she eagerly anticipates the rise of a stellar phenomenon.
~~~~~~~
The dog days of summer constitute the hottest part of the year. The name “dog days” is derived from the old belief that the Dog Star, Sirius, is what causes the heat. On nights like these, Sirius is closer to the Earth than usual, and he glows more than ever, as the brightest star in the sky.
Legend has it that when the dog days occur, the world enters a period of strange happenings, a time of mad magic. Of course, all of that speculation is ridiculous. You’d have to be shamelessly superstitious to believe it. But I can’t help but admit, when Sirius rises, there are times I find myself talking to Dog. I hope Nat’s doing well, I say. She was special even after you died. She was special for summer breaks eating ice cream, conversations about things even as bland as the ground, and an unexpected friendship.
I mutter under my breath as I peer through my telescope, and Sirius seems to shine a little stronger.
Don’t worry. I know it’s just a trick of the light.
~~~~~~~
Somewhere, deep in the copse of the sleepy suburbs, two figures emerge from a small house in a small neighborhood. It is Natalie, gently shepherding a puppy who follows her with tentative steps. The night is warm, and Natalie is glad to escape the stifling heat of the indoors. Gradually, with stops and starts, she makes her way with Puppy towards the elliptical enclosure of light blanketing the nearby sidewalk. Just as she steps into the soft orange warmth, the light is snuffed out, and darkness envelopes Natalie once again. Power outage? She looks up, surprised. Instead of orange, she sees an anarchy of stars, a single flame catching her eye in particular, and taking her back to the ninth grade. She doesn’t know that tonight is the night among the dog days that Sirius shines brightest, but for a second, she is breathless. By the next, the moment has passed. Shaking her head clear, she whistles and continues guiding the meek tug at the end of her leash, onwards.
