Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

“Yeah, mmhhmm,” Mallory says, hanging up quickly.

Iris looks at the clock on the stove. 5:48. She changes into jeans, ballet flats, and a bronze tank top. She drags her bag into the closet and dumps everything on the floor to switch her belongings into a smaller purse. The power drill falls out with a metallic thunk, her billfold and makeup clacking out along with it onto the closet’s peeling hardwood. She picks up the drill and pushes it underneath a pile of sweaters on the closet floor.

Once dressed, she walks down to the corner store to buy a bottle of wine. It is still light out, but it’s a tentative lightness. Dry leaves float past her down the sidewalk in the lazy breeze. She walks through the automatic doors and an electronic chime sounds, alerting the elderly man behind the counter to her arrival. She glances over at him, but he doesn’t look up from his paper. The wine selection is extensive, one side of the store filled with random grocery items and miniature bottles of detergent, all emblazoned with faded orange price tags, the other side hooch heaven, the selection ranging from dusty bottles of Old Grand-Dad to Dom Pérignon locked in a glass case perched up high behind the counter. She paces sideways across the wine aisle, craning her neck to peruse the top shelves. She doesn’t know anything about wine, so this perusal is for show, though no one is watching but the blinking red security camera behind the counter. The real decision is between the three cheapest cabernets, on the bottom shelf, each one under nine dollars. She chooses the one with the most austere gold lettering on its label.

Iris steps outside onto the sidewalk carrying the bottle by its neck in a paper bag and turns the corner back onto her street. The moment she turns, she is met by a giant Great Dane, leonine almost in its grace, its gray fur glowing in the not-yet moonlight. Sitting up straight on the sidewalk before her, its head practically reaches her chest. She stops and looks into its droopy brown eyes.

“Hi,” she says.

The dog stares back at her. Slowly, she reaches out a hand.

“Here,” she whispers, “here.” The dog looks at her hand but makes no move to sniff it. She inches closer and slowly moves her hand from in front of the dog’s face to the top of its head.

“Okay?” she asks, lightly touching the soft fur on the top of the dog’s head with her fingertips. She feels the outline of its skull. The dog doesn’t react, but allows her to continue petting. She rubs her whole hand on its head, then smoothes its ears back. At this, the dog closes its eyes in pleasure.

“Who are you?” she asks. The dog has a tag, and she leans down to read it.

“You have a very sophisticated name, Federico.” She looks back into the dog’s eyes. His ears have perked up at the uttering of his name.

Still petting his head, Iris looks around for a possible owner, someone running, frantic, dragging an empty leash, slack against the pavement. There is no one, anywhere.

“I guess you’d better come with me,” she says, “and we can call that phone number on your tag.”

She pauses then, wondering how exactly she will coax Federico into following her. There is no way that she could pull him, so he needs to follow of his own volition. She takes a few steps toward home and looks back. The dog has turned his head to watch her, but he hasn’t stood up.

“Are you coming?” she asks. “Are you coming, Federico?” He tilts his head to the left.

She takes another few steps and stops. When she turns, Federico is standing, still facing her. She locks her eyes onto his.

“Yeah,” she says, “like that. Keep going like that.”

She takes another few steps, and when she turns, Federico is just a few feet behind her, following with a worried look on his face, brows pinched and watery brown eyes wide.

He follows her all the way to her apartment building, and waits patiently while she unlocks the front door. She steps in, but he stays outside the threshold.

“Come on,” she says, “you have to follow me. You have to follow me all the way in.” He stays where he is, staring past her, she thinks, down the long hallway that stretches past the mailboxes.

“Federico,” she says, and at this he follows. She lets the door swing shut behind them and leads him up the stairs to her apartment. He moves up alongside her as they climb the stairs. She scratches his neck and imagines that they are long-estranged friends reunited, slightly dazed in the revisiting of old habits.

By the time they get inside the apartment, Federico seems comfortable and quickly begins sniffing the floor, walls, and furniture, barely containing his excitement. He disappears down the brief hallway to her bedroom, tail wagging.

“I know,” she says, “I know.”

Satisfied with his inspection, the dog rushes back to her, panting. He is so comically huge, he makes her already small apartment look doll sized. She rubs his cheeks with both hands and he melts, his eyes closing as he lowers himself to the carpet. Iris follows, curling up against him.

“I know,” she says, “I know,” and his fur is so soft. She lays her head on his back and hears the bellow of his colossal heartbeat. He outweighs her by at least thirty pounds and smells like dirt, as though he sprouted and grew in a garden she never knew was there, just waiting to be found.

She closes her eyes and breathes him in, falling asleep amid visions of black soil and cool, wet grass, the great magnet at the earth’s center locking it all in place. As she falls further into sleep, the magnet tightens. Instead of locking the earth in place, it is sucking everything back to its center with a grinding force that builds. Lying prone, she can feel her ribs as they loosen and pull apart from her skeleton. The ground begins to shake, and she feels her veins untangle as every part of her prepares to go under.

Iris wakes with a start to find herself splayed out face down on the carpet, Federico stretched out over her legs, pinning her. Her legs are numb below the knee. She panics.

“Federico! Get off!”

The dog casually stands up and Iris flips over onto her back and lurches her top half up like a spring as the blood returns to her legs in sharply tingling waves. She hugs her legs to her body and moans, “Owowowowow.”

“We’d better call your family, Federico,” she moans. “They must be worried sick.” The dog cowers as though he has done something wrong. Iris punches her calves and squints against the cave-like darkness of her living room.

When her legs have recovered, she stands up, switches on the light and heads for the kitchen phone. She calls the dog to her and consults his tag while she dials. While it is ringing, she glances at the clock on the stove and is shocked to see that it is 8:15 already. The phone continues to ring, and she is frazzled, disoriented, still. Federico lays his head on her left foot with the weight of a bowling ball. The call goes to voicemail and Iris hangs up.

“Oh no,” she says aloud, and Federico lifts his head up at her. She looks back at him, his black nose twitching.

“I bet you’re hungry,” she sighs.

She fills a bowl with cereal, no milk, and another with water.

“Here,” she says, placing the bowls on the floor, “that’s almost like kibble, right?”

While he drinks the water with gusto, splashing it all over the kitchen floor, she picks up the phone and hits redial. This time, a woman answers after three rings.

“Hello?”

“Hello? Are you missing a Federico?”

“You found him?! Where are you? I’ll be right there— is he okay?” the woman on the other end can barely get one sentence out before she interrupts herself. She sounds like she is halfway out the door already, lumbering toward a car.