“It’s really more like an outline. The gray part doesn’t seem important.”
“The outline of what?”
“I don’t know. Write down the other thing.” I lean back in my chair. The plastic is so flimsy, I can make it bend.
VIII.
“Two baby rats, climbing onto a moth.”
That night in The Rat Room, you told me that infant rat pups separated from their mothers emit a sound, a mewling, at a frequency undetectable by human ears. Other rats can hear it, though, and yours were restless in their cages. The inaudible ululation can continue for hours before the abandoned animal finally gives in to despair. In my hand, your last rat pup mouthed silent vowels.
“Next?”
IX.
“A pelvis, which could also be a butterfly, which could also be a vagina.”
“Only one to go,” Kimberly says almost encouragingly, a good scientist: detached, like you.
In labs, orphaned rat pups are given every physical element needed for survival—nourishment, warmth, and simulated maternal heartbeats—but unless the mother rat is returned, the infants almost always die. Scientists can quantify. They can add and remove influencing physical factors. But it may be impossible to calculate the value of a missing piece.
“The whole thing?” Kimberly says.
“The spiky things are lobsters. They’re fighting, but smiling.”
X.
“A bunch of disparate stuff again,” I say.
“Last one.”
“The spiny things are crabs.” I look at the blot and lean back in my chair. I don’t say anything until Kimberly stops writing and starts tapping her pencil. “A weevil is ripping the sea slug in half, but it’s holding together by a gut or a heartstring.”
When you told me about the crying mice, I thought of the abstract influencing factors, the metaphysical properties. If the baby rats are any indication, the ephemeral connection between animals is inborn. The tether is essential for survival, but when severed, the component parts become malignant. In the case of the rats, oxygen intake lowers drastically. Immune functions cease. The once-sustaining bond withers to one-sided longing. The subject begins to doubt that a connection ever really existed. Longing corrodes into hopeless despair, and in this state the animal welcomes annihilation.
“Anything else?” Kimberly is already unzipping her backpack.
“Not really. Space dust? The green thing looks like a mustache.”
Results
Back in the rec room, I resume my recording:
It is widely held that only two known elements lessen the detrimental physical effects manifested by the severance of the abstract property, herein referred to as [love]:
Time: arbitrary sequential structure applied to the occurrence of events and the intervals between
Space: boundaries imposed on a boundless dimension, based on the theoretical interplay between physical objects, given their proximity to other physical objects
For you, international research grants are a very good way to exit situations made uncomfortable by the interplay between physical objects. Halfhearted attempts at permanently exiting this boundless dimension led only to third-rate mental hospital purgation for me.
We hadn’t spoken in three weeks. I thought you were visiting your sister. By my calculations it was our third, possibly fourth, breakup and not the longest.
I received your email—Moved to Abu Dhabi—and wrecked my car. In the four-hour interim between these two events, substances were consumed. The responding officer was nice enough to take me to the emergency room instead of jail, probably because I never made it out of the laboratory parking lot.
At the hospital there were questions and injections, samples of all kinds, and later I moved from one hospital to another in a barred-windowed van. The zeppelin-me floated in the valley between mountainous nurses. At some point they took my clothes. I woke up under industrially bleached blankets, wearing skidproof socks.
The doctor told me to focus on the negative, to make a list of the bad things between us, to acknowledge the necessity of endings. I could only think of four things:
I always knew that I was an experiment, another one of your rats crawling through the maze: electrocution/reward, electrocution/reward. I could see the pattern, and I thought because I understood, I was somehow outside the parameters, that I was special. Evidence does not support that conclusion.
Once, you kissed me in the stairwell and then, not five minutes later, in front of a crowd of your colleagues, pushed me away and said, “Who are you?”
The last time, you came to my house after midnight and climbed into my bed. Then, in the morning, I loaned you my blue oxford shirt, buttoned every button except the very top, and leaned in to kiss you. You turned away and said, “Sometimes I think I could love you, but you’re so broken, probably too much trouble to fix.”
In the two years I knew you, that was the third and final time you used the word “love” in my presence. I, on the other hand, choked it back constantly, “loves” upon “loves” floating up behind my molars, damming up the flow of language.
After I compiled my list, the doctor seemed pleased. So I tried to tell him about the good things—Thanksgivings with your family; the time in the coat closet at the Entomology Department Halloween party; how when you’ve just woken up, with blinky eyes and snaggled hair, you look like a baby dinosaur; the day in December when I forgot my mittens, so you loaned me one of yours and held my other hand inside your coat pocket while we walked across the slushy campus.
The doctor said none of that matters.
Maybe your rat ate her babies so that they would never leave her. Or maybe it was an attempt at time travel, back to before, when there was only her own need.
Days are measured in pills and Dixie cups. I pad out of the ward to the cafeteria three times a day with the other patients from Unit A: nonviolent, safe from skidding in our identical mint-green socks.
“A few more days,” the admitting nurses say every time I ask.
I pace our unit hallway for hours every day. The nurses let me make the decaf, because my hands don’t shake. I stole two golf pencils from the doctor’s office to keep notes, but they disappeared from my sock drawer this morning during breakfast. If I write alone, in my room, it means that I am displaying antisocial behavior patterns. If I write at the table with the droolers and screamers, it’s called art therapy.
Before I met you, love was certain but dead, a perfect luna moth specimen alighted heavily on a black-lit, sugar-washed bedsheet. You could creep up while its furred feet were stuck in the syrup and sweep it into the kill jar. Wings furiously scaling chartreuse, then slowing, slowing, stilled. You could keep her forever, fixed behind glass.
Data
Conclusions
Data is inconclusive and impossible to accurately compile. No doubt this is entirely due to human error. The duration and resilience of love is as yet unknown, but if there was a moment when said property became manifest it was this:
“What happens?” I asked. The room was warm from so much rodent respiration, ammonia, decomposing print and pulp, a lightbulb’s worth of burnt energy radiating from each of our bodies. The blind fetal creature in my palm raised its rubber skull and howled mutely, more vibration left than life. You hung your lab coat on the back of the door. We could get formula, heat lamps. Behind me, you wrapped your arms around my waist; the wool of your sweater, almost soft, snagged the dry skin of my elbow.
Squinting into the cavern of my cupped palms, you rested your chin on my shoulder, your mouth so close to my ear that I felt the condensation of your breath, liquid-hot on my neck.
“You peer over your glasses like a librarian,” you said. “I love that.” Hand outstretched in a simulacrum of gentleness, you offered the doomed rat the tip of your finger, and for a moment she mistook it for comfort.
About the Author
KILBY ALLEN, a native of the Mississippi Delta, received her MFA from Brooklyn College, where
she was awarded both the Himan Brown Award and the Lainoff Prize in 2010. While living in New York, she worked in the literary department at Symphony Space and helped with the production of WNYC’s Selected Shorts. Currently, she is a PhD candidate and Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Nashville Review, Drunken Boat, and the Baltimore Review.
Brooke Weeber © 2014
Forsyth Harmon © 2013
SHEILA
* * *
REBECCA ADAMS WRIGHT
Today, sipping tea from a faded mug and sitting in front of his computer in running pants and sneakers, John grieved over yet another article about the demise of robotic pets. Sheila lay quietly beside his desk, shifting only when the rollers of his chair came too close to the fur of her belly or the brush of her undocked tail. Every so often while he read, John would put a hand on the dog’s head. He did this the way another man might rub his wedding ring or lay a hand on his crotch—to reassure himself that despite a harsh reality, the important things were still there.
Articles like the one he was reading had become common, and the gist was always the same. Computerized pets were clumsy, soulless, dangerously high voltage, hard to catch and eliminate should their programming malfunction, etc. Why had people ever bought them? What was the problem with good old-fashioned flesh and blood anyway? The author of this particular piece, a Cassidy Sim from Albany, New York, called for “the rounding up and incinerating of the last of the dinosaurs,” a “massive purge of those evolutionary dead ends not already laid to rest by the meteor shock of Ginger Creek.”
John sighed. Why did he do this to himself? He reached over to turn off the monitor and pushed himself up from the chair with a wince. Ginger Creek. His troublesome hip was bothering him again. Ginger Creek be damned. Those dogs were feral, never serviced; they were nothing like Sheila.
Eager for the next phase of their morning ritual, Sheila rose from her position under the desk. Her moist eyes followed John’s progress toward the kitchen. When he reached the doorway and turned to call her, she waggled her hind end and leaped lightly to the kitchen, patting the tiled surface of the counter with her white paws. This was the same reaction she had given him for years. She was slower now, her ball joints stiffer, but the sight of her small paws dancing along the blue tile never failed to make him smile.
“My goodness,” John said. He peered into the cabinets before him and raised a hand to his face in mock despair. “Dear me. I seem to have forgotten to buy dog biscuits. It seems there’s no treat today.”
“Aoo!”
“Biscuits?”
“Aoo!”
“There are biscuits here, you say?”
“Ar-oo!”
“Where, girl? Where are the biscuits?” He lowered himself into one of Millie’s old Mission-style kitchen chairs and waited for the aging dog to sniff her way along the bottom row of cabinets. Today he had hidden her rubber biscuit in the tiny cupboard under the sink. It was easiest for him to access it there, with the cabinet’s built-in lazy Susan.
“Rark!” Sheila stood at slender, pretty point. John had never been much of a hunter, but he loved this stance. All alertness and focus. Not unlike his own bones, Sheila’s parts were wearing down, but there were advantages to being mostly metal and microchips. Fur, sockets, individual wires—all these parts could be replaced. As long as her programming held, as long as she could lick oil into the joints of her feet and legs, his dog would be able to compose herself nearly as beautifully as she had in her first year. There was a joy in looking at her and watching the years drop away. He would never understand how anyone could call an animal as graceful as Sheila “clumsy.”
While he was drinking coffee and Sheila was gnawing at the same treat she gnawed at every morning, the phone rang.
Please don’t be Richard.
“How you doing, Dad?” John could hear his son David’s students in the background. Rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat-a-tat-tat.
“Drum solos?” he asked.
“Practice for Saturday’s game,” David said. The snares were muffled just enough to sound like an approaching army. “We’re working on sticking with the beat.” A hand over the phone. “Keep together, guys! Keep it going just like that.” The hand removed. “Sorry. I wanted to know if you’d talked to Richard yet.”
“Why?”
“Dad . . .” David sighed. “You haven’t, have you? Have you called him?”
“The business between Richard and me,” John said, feeling as prickly as he knew he sounded, “is nobody else’s business. And frankly, it’s none of Richard’s damn business either.”
“It sucks, Dad. I know. Trust me—I know better than anyone how bad it sucks. But you could lose your pension going against the county like this.”
“To hell with my pension.”
David sighed again. The drums behind him, metallic and sharp, snapped off beats like rubber bands. Rat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
“Just promise me that if he doesn’t call by tonight, you’ll call him.”
“You better get back to those kids. They’re losing cohesion.”
“Tell me about it. It’s called high school. But Dad—”
“It was good of you to call, Son.”
“Talk to Richard,” David said again before hanging up. “Please. I love her too, but she’s only a dog. Mom wouldn’t have wanted to see you screw up your good name over this.”
David, well-intentioned as he was, couldn’t remember Millie the way John did. Quiet, stubborn, brilliant Millie. John returned to the table and sipped his coffee slowly, thinking of her. His wife had been proud of him, yes, and proud of his work. Millie’s support was a source of comfort when he found himself agonizing over a particularly difficult draft of an opinion; it helped him, knowing that she invested a great deal of herself in being the wife of a circuit court judge. But Millie had also loved Sheila.
Some of their neighbors had balked at being introduced to a “mechanimal,” as pets like Sheila had occasionally been called then. But Millie had been as gentle and happy with the computerized dog as with the biological terriers she had owned in her rural youth. Up until the day she died, his wife could call Sheila to her with nothing more than a jangle of her turquoise bracelets. No matter where she was—asleep on their platform bed, watching for the mail truck, poking through the tall grass with David—the spaniel would come running.
John had been convinced there was something about Millie’s illness that Sheila could sense. It was impossible for him not to think so, watching the liver-and-white head settle onto his wife’s narrow lap, the amber eyes follow every small gesture that passed between partners. Even now, each of Millie’s many gestures, sounds, and scents was probably stored somewhere in Sheila’s incorruptible memory.
Perhaps that was one of the many reasons he loved her, her ability to hold on to these details. When Millie died, only Sheila seemed as inconsolable as John. Sheila was his companion when David started school, joined the hockey team, the swim team, became a teenager, went to college. And now it was Sheila who kept him from dreading the long, lonely expanse of the retirement he had always expected to share with his wife.
Millie had been the one to nickname Sheila “our little lady.” He had caught Millie, once, with the dog’s beautiful wedge-shaped head in her hands, outlining very seriously Sheila’s responsibilities to John and David once she was gone. She would never have wanted him to abandon the companion who still tied them together. A companion now, who—Lord, how time could fly—had stuck beside him for an astounding twenty-five years.
But still, there was Ginger Creek. John didn’t understand it any more than anyone else. There were hundreds of possible explanations for why those three dogs had turned on the children they were programmed to protect—poor socialization, lack of adequate servicing, a tiny flaw in the motherboard of their brains. And there were just as many preventative measures to keep those failures from occurring again. But the c
onsequences of the tragedy were clear. Less than a month after Randy, Jason, and Asia Dupree were torn to pieces in their own backyard, forty of the forty-seven states that had originally signed off on computerized pets were repealing the legislation. By Monday, owning Sheila would be a crime. And that couldn’t be avoided.
Every website John had searched had extolled the virtues of the Brittany spaniel. Intelligent, obedient, and cheerful dogs, they were good with children, friendly with strangers, and eager to please their masters. The booklet that came with Sheila had included a “care and maintenance” DVD that also emphasized, among other things, that Brittanys need to be given access to water.
“Whether hunting accessory or apartment companion,” the smiling young woman had told him, stroking the head of a mechanical spaniel taller and more prissily groomed than Sheila, “your Brittany has been meticulously engineered to American Kennel Club breed specifications. All of our working models are designed to withstand high pressures and extended exposure to water. Remember: your pet has been carefully programmed to exhibit desires appropriate to its breed. Be sure to run your new friend and get out to the lake or pool just as often as you can. Your Brittany will thank you for it.”
This need to “wet the dog” (as Millie called it) was not something John had anticipated. The first time he and David placed her in water—in a half-full kiddie pool purchased for the purpose—he was sure that the dog’s circuits would fry before their eyes, spitting and popping before her lifeless body slid beneath the surface. But Sheila seemed to enjoy the experience. She stood for a moment, wagging her brushy tail, and then sat down, soaked up to her belly with no ill effects. “Mom, come see!” David had run to bring Millie to the door. She stood there supporting herself on the door frame, too thin, a scarf around what remained of her dark hair, and watched the happy dog pant in the afternoon sun.
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 19
