My Dog Misses My Ex by Lyndsey Reese
I tell her he’s gone. For real this time. I deleted his number last weekend while scotch-drunk, so it’s not like he’s at the door when the buzzer rings. It’s just takeout. Ok, dog? It’s Bombay curry. She barrels down the hall anyway, whining later as the plastic bag of chicken saag rustles behind her.
I tell her she needs to work harder to fight her inborn sentimentality. We got dumped a month ago. She needs to move on already. She jumps up on the cedar chest in our living room, and she transforms into a ProPenn raquetball, small and blue. I set down my dinner and say, “Come on, that’s not what I meant. Come on, you know I’m on your side.”
She ignores me.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” I say. I sit on the hardwood floor in a display of solidarity. I’ve never been one for pep talks. “I’m sorry.”
She turns green, then back to blue, and rolls laterally. It’s neither an invitation nor a rebuke so I reach out and scratch the hard rubber of her belly. I wait for her to become my dog again.
I’m bummed too, but not like she is. She’s loved so few men and they always leave her—at a cousin’s friend’s duplex, in the parking lot of a Kmart in Oklahoma City, at yet another shelter mere weeks after an adoption event in McCarren Park.
She’s beautiful, black all over with white paws and a streak up her nose, but she’s got a sad face, mournful and aloof. The men who meet her now take her expression personally, saying things like, “I guess she doesn’t like me much” and “What’s she upset about?” and “Aw, such a sad girl.” She is a sad girl, but so what? We can’t all be Goldens or Bull Terrier puppies or graphic designers at well-funded startups in Soho. She can’t stand to be a dog at all.
At night she wonders what she did wrong. She’s trying to hide her vulnerability, but I see it anyway. She’s over it, truly, but she still feels like she needs to know. For closure. Healing. What did she do?
I tell her nothing. She’s perfect. She has me now and I’ll never ditch her anywhere. She tucks herself against me. My ex used to sleep in this nook. I’d drape my arm over his torso like a heavy rug.
We drift off to sleep. During the night, she transforms into a spoon, laid out on my pillow like a place setting at dinner. I put my cheek against her cold metal. We rest. She becomes a dog again, a breathing black mass of pain and whimpers. I wake her when her paws begin to twitch, when her lip curls into an unhappy grin. I tell her that heartbreak gets easier as you get older.
She’s not the only one with nightmares; I murder a dream-friend in extreme fashion. Overkill, literally. He helps me avoid a bad situation, but I can’t trust him, so in the moment before our escape, I point a bazooka at his head and blow him away. None of the other dream-friends know I’m guilty. I had my reasons, but none absolve me, and dear God, I want absolution.
When I wake, I still see my dream-friend’s head disappearing in a cloud of viscera. Beside me the dog is a knife, bloody and red. I get up to fill a glass of water, and there she is again, clicking down the hallway after me, smiling her sleepy dog smile in dark.
I throw on sweatpants and my dad’s old T-shirt in the morning, ready to work remote customer-service for an online payment processing company. Printed on the shirt is a poorly drawn Daffy Duck pitching a whiffle ball toward an empty home plate. Where is the batter? I’ve wondered for as long as this shirt has been mine. The laminate design chips off in pieces if I accidentally toss the shirt in the dryer, so now I wash it by hand in my tiny bathroom sink and leave it to hang-dry in the shower. I take better care of a 30-year-old T-shirt than any dry-clean-only dress.
I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the floor length mirror.
Oh god.
“What a catch I am,” I tell her. “Do you like these jogger sweats? How about this authentic side-pony? I styled it in my sleep.” I point to my hair and bob my head.
She climbs down from my bed and pads her way into the kitchen. I hear her lapping water. She doesn’t like it when I do this shtick, my schlubby lady shtick. She thinks it’s too self-deprecating. She wants me to be authentic and sincere. She finds it exhausting to be around me otherwise. I tell her it’s difficult to be real when she’s changed herself into a plush rabbit and keeps depressing the squeaker in her stuffing like it’s a noisy, bleating heart. Schuh-weak, skweek, schuh-weak. “Jesus,” I say. “Jesus are you kidding.”
We fight, but who doesn’t?
My company offers phone support, so that’s how I spend my day. This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes. You’ll need to remove the extra spaces from that field before trying to save. Please note that it may take up to ten days to delete the account due to the sensitive nature of this issue.
I enjoy the monotony of my work or at least I’m soothed by it. People’s problems are actionable tasks, one after another, flashing tickets in a bottomless queue. There is comfort and connection in helping strangers, even when they’re angry. They reveal their lives, so happy they are that I’m not a robot: I didn’t authorize this. My account was overdrawn by my son-in-law. I CANCELLED THIS A YEAR AGO.
But still, when I tell acquaintances what I do for a living, I watch their interest fade. It’s time to get another drink, use the restroom. Time to step away, as though my circumstances threaten contagion. I know I’m supposed to be ashamed of this job, of my lack of ambition, so like a good girl, I am. Is this my life and what am I doing with it?
It gets to me during the work day too: I receive a text from a friend about her latest success or I hear a song that I loved when I was a fourteen-year-old lifeguard, all burnt shins and freckled shoulders, carrying an image in my head of future not-this. My dog nuzzles my hand when she sees shame spread like a flush through my skin. I worry her soft ear with my fingers. When I let go, she turns into a replica of her dog bed. I remove my headset, reject the next call, and climb down to the floor. I rest my head on her plush side, inhaling the faintest scent of dog urine and sweat, and I cry a little because I can’t help it, I’m a crier.
We go for walks through the fall. I relish the crunch beneath my boots, and she breaks from routine to squat over wind-tossed piles of leaves.
I am always alone in November. That’s not the entire truth, but it’s the story I’m telling, the truth that feels bone-deep and carved into mountains. Midway through our walk, my dog tries to become a mountain for me. Oh, how she tries. But she looks like a cross between knee-high pyramid and baked potato. She’s doing this for me, but I’m feeling resentful. Where are the trees? I want to ask her. Where’s your frosted peak? She grows a shrub on her back, a furry mole, like she’s reading my mind.
Who knows—maybe she can. Dogs are our empaths. But I’m in a bad mood, annoyed by this interruption and embarrassed by her behavior, even though the streets are empty and we’re alone. When her mountain trick doesn’t work, she returns to herself defeated. She begins to get smaller.
“C’mon,” I say. “Don’t.” I feel belligerent and antagonistic. “Don’t do that. Get bigger! Grow! Come on!” But I shut up when I see she’s shrinking further, turning into a miniature version of herself.
My ex used to say, “I wish we could shrink her down, like pocket-size, and then we could take her everywhere. Yes! Let’s do it, let’s bring her to dinner. She can run on the table and eat from our plates.”
“No,” I said incredulous. “Absolutely not. We’re not doing that.”
What a buzzkill I was, he told me. It was just a suggestion.
We had that conversation so many times. I didn’t know why I reacted with such revulsion, but now that he’s gone, I understand. I’ve never wanted her to be smaller, city living be damned. I want her to blossom, to grow, to take up space. I want her to carry me to Prospect Park on her back. I want to lie in the wide wilderness of her fur and look up at the sky as if I’m in Utah backcountry again. I want her to be bigger than all of us.
She’s the size of a squirrel on the sidewalk when I say, “Please. I can’t do this.” After he left, she shrank herself until she was so tiny that she could’ve been an ant, a mindless automaton. Perhaps that’s all she wants—oblivion, not heartbreak—but panic has me by the throat now. I imagine returning to my apartment alone, without her soft belly, soulful eyes, her shape-shifting talents. I can’t do it.
She takes her time but becomes full size again. We continue our walk in silence. She spends the night on the living room couch.
Alone in bed I track loneliness as though it’s a weather pattern and I’m a map. I try to chart its path to see if it’ll dissipate or move out of my territory. What is this wound and how did it get here? Why am I so lonely? I search my past for an origin story and come up empty handed. I search online, typing out variations on the same theme, and studies return: It’s genetic, it’s social media, it’s contagious. Loneliness is bad for survival. It eats away our health. Down the hall she worries her paw with her tongue. She’ll wet holes into her skin until she creates a wound, until she makes herself unrecognizable. My hands find my face and follow its ridges and bumps. I dig my nails into my cheeks, my chin, my forehead.
Have I made myself unrecognizable or did I start out this way?
I don’t miss him that much. Only at night, and only when I’m down half a bottle of wine. I deleted his number partially out of spite. But also because I’m a mouthy drunk who wants facts to climb the night like skyscrapers and feelings to hit those buildings in the morning like brass-tacks sunlight.
But not everybody wants that.
I want to tell her it’s ok to be heartbroken, but sometimes I don’t think it is. Heartbreak is dissolution. You are a memory, overwritten by mescal cocktails and replaced with street names in a new neighborhood.
I get up and write down everything I hate about him. Our arguments looping like code. How he asked me not to sing along on our cross-country road trip to the Uintas. How his problems expanded into our afternoons like bloat. I draft an email and send it to myself. The subject line reads, FUTURE YOU. The body is an inventory of grievances.
In the morning everyone is sorry. I find her stretched on the sunbeam floor, light catching red in her fur. Her thumping tail is my heartbeat. I kiss her head. The night is gone and I’m relieved. I enter myself as though pulling on a robe. We’re quiet in happiness, contentment, the fragile unity that follows a fight. We fix breakfast. I sip coffee. By afternoon rain falls and chill digs fingers into our limbs. It’s a strange and uncomfortable relief to feel cold again. I read a novel. She morphs into her toys: spinning disk, red bone, bone with weird fork, one of my socks.
When the rain breaks, we sneak a walk in the last drops of sunlight. The sidewalk, empty and glistening, guides us to a small park nearby. In the distance, a man walks towards us. Dusk blurs his features but I know that idiot buzzed scalp, that head-down posture, the duck-toed gait. I feel pressure to perform, to come with anecdotes, a litany of successes ready to be produced and considered in any light.
She sees him too. She strains on the leash, jerking my arm. Her tail begins to wag as she drags me up the gentle stairs and across the deserted basketball court. He wears boots and a rain jacket, the white cord of his earbuds snaking across his torso. We’re headed right for him. Then his facial features come into relief under a streetlight—he’s not our ex, with his worn-thin collared shirts.
“Wait,” I say to her, but it’s too late. She’s already leaping toward him. I tug on the leash, harder than I intend, trying to spare this stranger the touch of her damp paws.
“I’m sorry,” I call to him. He nods in acknowledgement as he walks away.
She takes hesitant steps toward his back. I reach out to touch her, to offer comfort in case she’s sad, to let her know I’m still here, I’ll never ditch her anywhere, but as my fingers graze her fur, she bursts into leaves, crinkled and bright, a stunning pile at my feet. A breeze rustles her sideways, and I kneel to gather her up. My palms brush the concrete. She surrounds me—she’s crimson and gold, the most vibrant hue in an indigo night. Then there’s a gale. I watch her fly. I watch and I wait for her to become my dog again.
Lyndsey Reese holds an MFA in fiction from Arizona State University. Her fiction has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, PANK, and Passages North, among other publications. Additional writing has been featured on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and the Ploughshares blog. She lives and writes in Brooklyn.
27 May 2022
Leave a Reply