Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

She had aches and pains. Sometimes on winter days, her hands just didn’t want to work, and she went about her chores like she had flippers on the ends of her arms. Her finger joints were gnarled and swollen and she took fish oil and glucosamine and vitamin C daily without too much noticeable improvement. She chewed ibuprofen like candy, and worked off the rest of the pain petting her dogs.

Since retiring, she’d volunteered at the animal shelter three days a week. She’d adopted dogs, of course, one or two a year, and she currently had nine, mostly mutts, except one purebred Dalmatian that showcased all of the magnificent idiocy inherent in its pedigree. He was a car chaser. Any vehicle that came down her road, he’d be after it, eyes rolled back in ecstasy, barking, slobber flying, trying to bite the tires. He was going to get his empty head crushed. She kept him inside with her most of the time, and he sat on the back of the couch, looking out the picture window to the road, eyeing each passing car wistfully.

She still had goats. She had chickens. She had one Red left. It stood solitary out in the pasture, and sometimes, while tossing hay, she thought she saw something in its eyes, a mean stubbornness. “You’re not going to outlast me,” she’d say. “Keep looking at me that way, and see where it gets you. I’ll take care of you once and for all. I’ll have you parceled up in my freezer, wrapped in butcher paper. And I swear to god I won’t go to the grave until I’ve eaten every last piece of your scrawny ass.”

—

Lauren was seventy-three years old, older now than her mother ever had been. It seemed impossible. Probably the only people who aren’t surprised to find themselves arriving suddenly at old age are the ones who didn’t make it that far.

3.

Jason’s trailer had been empty now for years, five or six, she couldn’t remember. He’d been there with his dog, same as always, and then one night his truck hadn’t returned. It stayed gone. The trailer had a broken window, and she’d seen pigeons flying in and out. Sometimes, she sat on her back porch in the evening and devoted a few moments of her pondering to imagining fates for him. Occasionally, she was feeling generous and she let him win the lottery and move to California. Most of the time he got killed in a drunk-driving accident or addicted to methamphetamine and shot in a drug deal gone bad.

—

One Saturday, after she was returning from a morning of walking dogs at the shelter, she came down her road and there was a silver minivan in the driveway of Jason’s trailer. It had a flat tire and it somehow seemed exhausted, as if it had pushed itself to the limit to get its owner to this point, and now, upon arrival it was giving up the ghost, a trusty steed used up in service.

Lauren slowed. There was a girl standing on the sagging porch. She had a blond ponytail and wore pink shorts. She waved at Lauren and then Jason emerged from inside. He’d gained weight. Lauren noticed immediately. Even from a distance, he looked heavy. He was leaning on crutches, his foot encased in a dirty white bandage. He saw Lauren and made no sign of recognition. He motioned for the girl to get inside and they both went in and shut the door behind them.

It was a beautiful day in mid-June — the sky a smear of bright blue, the sun warming the grass. Lauren could only guess what the inside of that trailer looked like, pigeons and all. She’d had pigeons set up a nest in the rafters of her storage shed once. At first, she’d let them be, out of respect for their eggs. They’d turned her whole workbench white with their shit in a matter of days. Eventually, she had to knock the nest down with a broom and she felt bad about it. The eggs splattered on the concrete and one of them broke open and she could see the alien shape of a hatchling in there.

—

She had her binoculars, and she often stood at the kitchen window with them trained on Jason’s trailer. She felt slightly bad for spying, but so what? She was an old woman with little to do and she hadn’t done anything worth apologizing over in a long time.

Jason rarely came outside. But the girl was often in the yard. Doing what, Lauren could not always tell. She walked around the trailer with a stick, hitting the walls randomly until Jason came out and Lauren could see his mouth open wide as he yelled at her to stop. When Jason went back inside, the girl hunkered down in the weeds and her back was to Lauren so she couldn’t tell what she was doing, until she saw a thin trickle of smoke rising over her head. Was she smoking? No. She’d started a fire. She squatted next to it, pink shorts and tank top, holding her hands out as if she were warming them. Lauren’s porch thermometer read seventy-three degrees, not a breath of wind or a cloud in the sky. Where in god’s name was this child’s mother? Why was she not in school? The van hadn’t moved since they’d arrived. The tire still flat all the way down to the rim, resting on the gravel. What were they eating? Were they living in there with pigeon shit and feathers and who knows what all else? Jason had at least taped a piece of cardboard over the broken window. Through the binoculars, Lauren had observed the birds returning, flying around the roof in vain, their distress seemingly visible in their erratic passes. Maybe they had eggs in there. A nest in the cheap glass chandelier over the dining room table. The young ones chirping hungrily. The adults unable to reach them. An old woman’s meandering. Of course, if there had been a nest, Jason would have cleared it out first thing, like she had the one in her shed. There was nothing else to do. If one was sentimental enough to see tragedy in the plight of pigeons, even the happiest human life would be unbearably sad.

She continued to keep her eye out for the mother. Maybe she was inside. There had to be a woman — Jason’s wife, or girlfriend, or something. There was no way a girl would be living with him for any other reason. Occasionally, Jason would come out on the porch, always on the crutches. He’d smoke a cigarette, looking off at the mountains. Sometimes he would piss simultaneously and Lauren would be able to see the yellow arc of it, glistening in the sun. When he’d finished, he would flick the butt of his cigarette into the weeds, zip up, and go back inside, the thin walls of the trailer rattling as the door slammed behind him.

—

Lauren had never been much of a cook. There was no magic to it though, she knew that. Some people wanted to make out that being a good cook was some sort of artistry and maybe at some level it was, but mostly all it entailed was a basic ability to follow directions. She’d cooked for her mother, whose brain had probably been too scrambled to taste the difference between carrots and chocolate cake. She’d cooked for Manny. He’d never said much either way about it. He never had an appetite for anything other than Lauder’s scotch whiskey. She’d cooked for Sandy — well, they had often cooked together, and that was a different thing entirely. Less about the actual food and more about the act of preparation, the whole meal like one big flirt.

These days, Lauren scrambled a couple eggs in the morning and spooned them on buttered toast. She often skipped lunch completely, sometimes had just an apple and a wedge of cheese. For dinner she ate a bowl of canned soup with a handful of saltine crackers crushed up in it. Her doctor told her she needed to watch her sodium levels, so she had been getting the Healthy Choice soup lately. It cost twice as much and tasted half as good.

Lauren thawed some chicken breasts she’d had in the freezer. She dug out one of her good, seldom-used Pyrex baking dishes. She put the breasts in there on top of a bed of instant rice and poured over a couple cans of chicken mushroom soup. She scattered some croutons on the top and put it in the oven. Her Dalmatian — named Rocks, after the contents of his head — watched her move about the kitchen, the expression on his face, if possible, more quizzical than usual. Usually, he got to lick out a soup bowl at some point during kitchen operations, but thus far none had been offered, and he was obviously concerned. He whined.