I was taking a long walk, the first day I had stepped out of the house in an unmarked direction, just a squiggly line on a trail map. I wanted to lose myself. My son had died a month ago from an advanced form of cancer.
A distant figure with an assortment of dogs.
Poodles and pit bulls. They had jumped out of a grey SUV, abandoned in the stream, rusted and dented, a nondescript grey paint sprayed unevenly over the body. She stood in the water and collected fish inside a bucket. It was red and
swimming toward her.
The dogs waited, but only after she had dropped a fish between the paws of each supine animal, did they begin to eat. They were bandaged and limped badly. I thought that maybe she was from a special branch of the ASPCA that cared for abused animals. Sat down on a fallen tree trunk and watched. Buckeye trees blazed with blossoms of white candelabra. Stinging nettles lined the stream.
An opera house of clouds formed in the sky, billowing. Grey.
Everyone had told me that time heals all, but I wasn’t sure that I would ever feel whole again. He’d been nine years old. We’d buried him with his toys. The stuffed doggie with floppy ears. I approached, wanted to ask whether the path doubled back to the canyon. I’d been walking all morning. I was feeling tired and hungry. Something. When she saw me, she barred my approach.
The dogs started to bark. Are they dangerous? She said her dogs didn’t like strangers. How did the animals get hurt? She shook her head and told me I was making the dogs skittish, a thin woman dressed in a torn black sweatshirt and pants. Her arms were scarred. She became frantic and told me to go away. I said I needed help, but as I spoke, the dogs began to whine and rolled on the ground.
The animals turned into children, the poodles were the youngest, and the pit bulls more like twelve year olds, stood near the stream with their rotten bandages and stink. It happened gradually, a hand appearing where there had been a paw, a tail dropped away. All of them licked at their wounds with pink tongues and began to howl, not sure if they were humans or still dogs. Even more unsettling, I recognized in the dog-walker’s eyes
the vacant stare of a mother who had been unable to protect her children.