Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

She stood over him for a long while, watching him sleep. It was difficult for her to gather her thoughts. She was rather stunned, a little in shock. She went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and forgot what she was doing and stood for a long while at the sink staring at her shaking hands and the stained porcelain in the basin of the sink.

In the afternoon he woke to find she was not there, had left a note that she was going away for a while, that she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to come back or not, whether there was any point to coming back at all, and that the insanity with the gun was truly frightening to her and caused her to wonder whether things had finally gone too far, that if he could shoot himself in the foot in order to make a point, then who was she to say that one day, in order to make a point, he would not shoot her in the foot or the hand or point-blank right between the eyes?

He stood at the sink reading over the note, trembling at first with rage that she would leave while he lay wounded in the other room, then awash with a flood of shame and grief. He could hardly believe that she had gone and might not come back and that he hadn’t been able to keep this from happening, yet another disaster, his third marriage down the drain.

He limped back to bed with the note crushed in his fist and lay down and stared at the ceiling. Theirs was an old house with real plaster on the ceilings and walls and he lay there for a long while looking at it, its hidden patterns slowly revealing themselves. How had the workmen made that simple but beautiful finish on the plaster? As if it had been pressed into place with crushed flowers. There were no craftsmen such as that at work anymore. He couldn’t imagine how they might have done it, and he wondered for some minutes about the various ways in which they possibly had.

The dog, who’d been hiding somewhere in the house, crept into the bedroom, her head low, still trailing the leash clipped to her collar, her eyes wary and vulnerable. Then she crept backward from the room again and he heard her claws clicking across the kitchen linoleum and the sound of the leash dragging behind her on her way back to the den.

It was not all over, surely. She wouldn’t stay away forever. He was fairly certain of that. She would’ve taken the dog, surely, if she meant to be gone for good. She was right that he should somehow get rid of the gun. The whole thing was at least as absurd as anything else they’d ever done, and the gun was the most absurd thing that he’d ever done, he’d have to grant that, and the painful embarrassment, the horror he was feeling, as he lay there, was nearly as excruciating as the throbbing pain returning to his foot. He fought against a great creeping weight of despair. What a fool he was. My God. He sighed heavily and reached for the foil packet of Percocets, popped one out, and swallowed it with water she’d left in a glass on the bedside table within reach. He took a pillow from her side and put it underneath his injured foot, to elevate it.

BACK IN THE DEN, the dog was not at all certain the woman would ever return. She had only watched the woman leave the house and drive sadly away in her vehicle, without saying a word to her, the dog. Now the dog didn’t know what she would do. She thought all this was at least partly her fault.

With her previous owners, before she’d escaped and been taken to the shelter, she’d been beaten for simply crossing from one room to the next. For crapping in the very yard into which they had kicked her in order to crap. For barking when the very real threat of another dog entering their yard had been imminent. She had protected them! Defended their honor and territory! And they’d beaten her! It had scrambled her mind. She ran away. She was captured and put into yet another cage. The man and woman came by one day and took her home, and were kind to her, but almost immediately the daily loud barking and snarling started up, and even if she could usually tell when it was about to start she was always frightened and wanted to run away. Now here she was beneath the coffee table, licking her paws, with their leash fastened to the collar about her neck, and nowhere to go. No walk. No drive up into the mountains to chase squirrels. No quick trip to the prairie to jump jack rabbits, harass the cowardly pronghorn herd. She could trip open the back screen, jump the fence, and walk until another man or woman or couple saw the leash and took it up. She could offer herself to someone else this way, take her chances.

But another couple, another family, would only present a new set of baffling circumstances. Of this she had no doubt. In spite of their bad behavior, this couple had loved her and cared for her and served her well. She resolved to stay under the coffee table, the leash clipped to her collar in hope, and wait for the woman to return.

But she couldn’t rid herself of the darkening fear that once again everything had gone to hell. She didn’t know if she could take it all happening all over again. She had tried so hard to be smart, to stay out of trouble. But she had been distracted by her own anxiety, hadn’t paid proper attention, and if the woman had been driven away, maybe she would have to go away now, too. She began to gnaw hopelessly at the end of her leash, but that didn’t comfort her at all. For the first time in a long time, since she was very young and homeless and hungry, she raised her muzzle into the air and let out a long, mournful howl.

IN THE BEDROOM, the man felt the howl penetrate to the very center of his wretched heart. He lay there looking at his discolored toes sticking out from the white gauze wrapping, blinking back tears, and tried to console himself. However horrible he had been, he had not actually harmed her and perhaps she’d consider this and come home. However colossally stupid he had been, concerning the gun, at least it had put an end to that terrible argument.

BACK IN LATE MAY A TORNADO DROPPED SCREAMING into the canyon, snapped limbs and whole treetops off, flung squirrels and birds into the black sky. And in the wet and quiet shambles after, several new stray dogs crept into the yard, and upon their heels little Maeve. You’ve seen pictures of those children starving on TV, living in filthy huts and wearing rags, and their legs and arms just knobby sticks, huge brown eyes looking up at you. That’s what she looked like.

These strays, I sometimes think there is something their bones are tuned to that draws them here, like the whistle only they can hear, or words of some language ordinary humans have never known — the language that came from Moses’s burning bush, which only Moses could hear. I think sometimes I’ve heard it at dawn, something in the green, smoky air. Who knows what Maeve heard, maybe nothing but a big rip-roaring on the roof: the black sky opens up, she walks out. She follows an old coon dog along the path of forest wreckage through the hollow and into my yard, her belly huge beneath a sleeveless bit of cloth you might call a nightslip.

I knew her as my Uncle Sebastian’s youngest child, who wouldn’t ever go out of her room, and here she was wandering in the woods. They lived up beyond the first dam, some three miles up the creek. She says to me, standing there holding a little stick she’s picked up along the way, “I don’t know where I’m at.” She gives it an absent whack at the hound. He’s a blue-tick with teats so saggy I thought him a bitch till I saw his old jalapeño hanging out.

I said, “Lift up that skirt and let me see you.” I looked at her white stomach, big as a camel’s hump and bald as my head, stretched veins like a map of the pale blue rivers of the world, rivers to nowhere. I saw her little patch of frazzly hair and sex like a busted lip wanting nothing but to drop the one she carried. Probably no one could bear to see it but God, after what all must have climbed into her, old Uncle Sebastian and those younger boys of his, the ones still willing to haul pulpwood so he hadn’t kicked them out on their own, akin to these stray dogs lying about the yard, no speech, no intelligent look in their eyes.