"Dark Animal" by AG Latham
When you came into the kitchen, I was wiggling fried eggs onto a plate, my shirt on backward because of the stain. You tripped and caught yourself on the counter, blaming your dizziness on swollen sinuses, but I knew you were out drinking last night. It was then you saw your childhood teddy bear in a puddle by the dog bowls, its head chewed off. I didn’t notice till you picked it up and drew a line across your neck with your finger and said if I weren’t around, you’d return the favor. The culprits’ jowls were stuck with fuzz, and they were smiling at us. The rest of the day, we kept finding bits of wet stuffing between couch cushions and buried in the shag carpet.
I had my first heart attack that evening. It started with a bright, blinking pain in the armpit that came and went for a while. I’d felt the pain before, but usually it went away. As the sun passed over the house and fell behind the hills, the blink became a throb passing over what was once my breast—it was now just an old gunnysack. Then it dug into the valley between my ribs, or what used to be a valley, but now, rolling hills. My arm went to sleep. I had difficulty breathing. I had a cigarette to calm my nerves, and you asked if everything was all right. Funny enough, it wasn’t so different from having contractions. When they got bad enough, I could no longer tell where things began and ended—you, me, your father’s worry, the midwife’s arms—my body so swollen and electrified it could eat the world.
“Something’s happening,” I said, sinking into the armchair. You went for your phone, maybe knowing what that something was before I did. The dogs sniffed my rhinoceros feet with delight.
They kept me only two days. The doctor said to quit red meat and smoking. That was it. First thing I did when we got to the parking lot was light up. You ripped the butt out of my mouth, threw it down, and ground it out with the heel of your boot. I reached for my bag hanging on the grip of the wheelchair, but you snatched it up, scowling down at me through your thick red hair. I gave you that hair. I tried to stand, but you shoved me back down in the chair and dumped the front wheels into the sod where it was too soft and damp for me to maneuver.
Hours later, you caught me smoking on the back porch—I always kept a carton in the freezer—and started to cry. We sat too still for a while, and then you started telling me about a guy you met at a bar. You liked him, but you weren’t sure why. He wasn’t attractive. But there was something. Maybe it was just that he was someone you didn’t know well enough to dislike. I laughed at your retelling of his bad pick-up line, and you admitted that when you were out drinking, you didn’t care who hit on you. Any attention paid to you made you feel less like yourself and more like someone other people wanted to be with. “I like being with you,” I said, but I’m not sure you heard. We stayed out there and finished the pack, falling stars drawing their silver fingertips across the sky.
A hundred times, I pushed you to go home. Your toiletries took up too much space in my bathroom, and you refused to sleep in your old room. You were no help to me around the house, always leaving cereal out on the counter and cheese unwrapped in the fridge and fresh butts in the ashtray. Day after day I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, fed the dogs, took out the trash, fielded calls from the insurance company. The dogs lost interest in your every move, and I needed my bed back, my house back. I kept saying there was no need for the long stay, but when you looked at me all you saw were clogged arteries and funeral expenses. Tethered to the ghost under my skin, you couldn’t see how dead your eyes looked at night.
You were out with that guy from the bar when it happened again. Again, I felt you inside me, wanting out. The lights went dark and the earth shook, and people were shouting. Later, they said I called your name, but I don’t remember. All I remember is riding bareback on a dark animal, bathing in its cool sweat, its coarse bristles pricking the flesh of my inner thighs as we moved together.
Now, we keep the dogs tied out in the side yard. Ginger’s been inseminated by the neighbor’s pit bull, the one who knows how to jump the fence. You don’t talk to that guy from the bar anymore, and the new light in Ginger’s eyes makes your skin crawl. For long stretches of time, you look out the window and fly off somewhere. I haven’t yet gotten up from the wheelchair by myself, and sometimes I wonder if you’re capable of letting the animals starve. But then the wind rattles the windowpane, and you close your eyes and press the soles of your feet into the wood floor. Outside, fall leaves are drying in the gutter, and the big orange sun hangs low in the sky. When you open your eyes, the light has faded, and you look surprised to see me there. The dogs have been whining out in the yard, but you’ve only just noticed. You get up and dip their bowls into the bag of kibble and head down the rickety steps, leaving the kitchen door open.
AG Latham has an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University, where she teaches in the English Department. Her prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Heavy Feather Review, Camera Obscura, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Chariot Press among others. She is currently at work on a children’s book series and a debut novel.
