Rescue the wrong dog at the right time, or the right dog at the wrong time. Press the accelerator like you’re smashing a scorpion, don’t let up. Just sign the paper, take the free bag of kibble. The moon is full or it is a crescent; he has freckles or else he is most certainly a Sagittarius, your weakness. Ignore your obligations. Fill the shopping cart with rawhide, Kongs, ThunderShirts The Furmanator. Contemplate the Chuck It! A quality ball flinger makes for an agile pup. Raise the dead. Blow the cobwebs from the Tempurpedic dog bed, expired glucosamine, peanut butter toothpaste, let your pheromones lead the way. If the peanut gallery tries to reason with you, desensitize them with a sweaty ham roll until your boyfriend, your mother, your boss, heel.
It will only make sense at 2 a.m., when your PTSD is lulled to sleep by his watchful drooling. You’re retuning somewhere, to something, un-ruptured. Fuck it all up. Put the brown mutt on the school bus, your daughter in the harness. Find comfort in irony. He lifts his leg to every fire hydrant—don’t be so predictable you silly hoot! If he snarls, bites or triggers, you’re getting closer. Google muzzle. It is too adorable a word to rattle your delusion. You are not alarmed. Perform voice-overs for the dog. He sounds like Chris Tucker with slobbery vowels. When your daughter asks if he could be her stepdad, crack up at that kid’s wit! Tell her no, sorry, he doesn’t wear pants.
Roll all the windows down. You remember this is what you’re good at, forgetting the lint brush, canceling dates, dog park small talk, tummy rubs. When he finally remembers his new name it will fall apart. You’ll skin both knees, sustain a puncture wound while prying his jaws off of a toy poodle. There are seventeen different collars in your virtual basket: the Prong, the Choke, the Martingale, Zinger 2000. You square your hips. Peacock your chest, you’re the alpha. A pack is growing up around you. At the manicure place, the technician looks at your filthy, scabbed up hands, he asks if you’re in charge of the handiwork. The world flaps through your doggie-door heart. Nothing adds up anymore: his webbed feet, those sheltered eyes, the fitful dreaming you called “sleep grieving” where he whimpered and twitched, bunched the covers into a wad.
There are no bad dogs. No bad girls. Only broken skin, a broken system, a quarantined knot in your gut. Fail by hiding his empty dog bowls. Bury his milk bones in the bottom of the junk drawer. Roll all the windows up. Cry. Lean into fetchy theories: Albert Eisenstein once called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” but you believe your particles howled together in the same cage for six weeks, so you are leashed together forever. Look up the words chomp, sting, weak, terrible, people, return, break, break, break. Bandage your hand. Don’t send letters. Avoid ads that end in Pawsitively and Who Rescued Who. Sit. Stay. Ice your grief.
