Dog in Orbit

A woman comes home and discovers her dog is missing. It is an ugly mutt with a face like a leathered wino but, nevertheless, she misses it. She goes back outside. A thin old man is collapsed face down on the sidewalk in a puddle of drool. She nudges his skeletal shoulder with her foot.

“Whu …?” He squints up into the sunlight.

“Have you seen my dog?”

“Can you help me up?”

The woman bends down and grabs the man beneath the arms. It’s a struggle but he makes it to his feet. He sits down on a retaining wall and pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket. The woman sits down on his left and he puts a hand to the side of his face, pretending she can’t see him. She stands up and walks in front of him. “Have you seen my dog?”

The man silently points to a house across the street. He throws his cigarette out into the road and slides back down onto the sidewalk. The woman crosses the street to the house the old man pointed to. It’s pretty dilapidated. She didn’t even know anyone lived there. Once she’s in front of the house, the old man shouts from the sidewalk: “Hey, lady! Think you can help me up?”

She doesn’t want to help him up. She ignores him. She walks up onto the porch of the dilapidated house and knocks on the door. The door opens quickly, as though someone stood just on the other side, waiting. Her dog jumps up on her, his front paws on her thighs. She reaches down to pet him. A rugged-looking man stands behind the dog, a leash in his hand. “Whoa, boy,” he says. He pulls the dog back into the house.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman says. “But I think there’s been a mistake.”

“I like dogs,” the man says. “Make no mistake about that. I love ’em.”

“I’m sure you do. But this is my dog.”

“No. You’re confused. It’s my dog.”

“No. This is most certainly my dog.”

“I like dogs. It’s my dog now.”

“No. It’s still my dog.”

“Hardly.” The man chuckles. “Look, maybe it could be our dog.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah. You move in and stuff. It’ll be our dog.”

“Please just give me my dog back.”

“He likes me better.”

The dog laps at the woman’s face as she continues to pet him. It farts on the man.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the man says. “Or stay. The choice is yours. But you can’t take the dog with you.”

The woman decides to move in. The man isn’t too atrociously ugly and she doesn’t have a boyfriend anyway. The man never leaves the house so she never has the chance to take the dog back. The man never even lets go of the leash. The sex is subpar and awkward.

One day, the dog chews up one of the man’s shirts. “We have to get rid of it,” the man says.

“I’ll just take him and go home.”

“Nope. Gotta make sure he’s far away. I need my shirts. And you need to learn about loss.”

The man drags the dog into the kitchen. He rummages through drawers and opens cabinets. In the refrigerator he finds a pair of large wings. “These oughtta do it,” he says.

He holds the wings against the dog’s fur, as though they’ll just magically adhere themselves. They don’t. “Whatta you think’s the most humane way to go about this?” he asks. “I got staples, nails …”

“I don’t know what you’re planning to do but you’re scaring me. And you’re scaring the dog.” She points to the dog, its tail between its legs and whimpering.

“Maybe glue. Yeah, I got some good glue.”

“I can’t let you do this.”

“You can and you will. This here’s my dog. You ain’t got no say in it.”

The woman is now crying. “It is not your dog.”

The man slathers glue on the base of the right wing and sticks it to the dog, under its right shoulder. “We done been over this. This here’s my dog and I get to choose what happens to it. When you went and moved in you unconditionally accepted the fact that this here was my dog. If you was so upset about it, thinkin’ it was your dog and everything, you woulda called the cops or somethin’.”

The woman takes a deep breath. “There haven’t been any cops for years.”

“I suppose that’s my fault too, huh?”

“I can’t stand here and watch this anymore.”

The woman wants to attack the man but she’s afraid he will hurt her and the dog and then it will have all been pointless. She leaves the room and sits on the rancid couch in the living room, turning on the TV and watching static patterns snow across the fractured glass. In a few minutes the man walks through the living room, carrying the dog. Both wings have now been affixed to the dog’s back.

The man chuckles. “If you love somethin’ you got to set it free.”

The woman buries her face in her hands and cries, her shoulders heaving.

She doesn’t want to follow the man and the dog outside but curiosity gets the best of her. She thinks maybe the dog will run off and she can run after it, knowing the man will be too lazy to follow. The man delicately descends the porch steps and stands in the wasted front yard. A boy rides his bike down the street, dragging an old pushmower behind him. The mower is running, loud, almost drowning out the boy’s shouted obscenities.

“Here goes,” the man says. He tosses the dog up into the air and the wings begin flapping. The dog rises into the sky, higher and higher, until it flies so high it goes into orbit. By this time, it’s well out of sight.

The man and woman go back inside. The man keeps the empty leash strapped to his wrist. In the following days he becomes despondent and mentally abusive. He brings home hideous women covered in various lumps and odors. The lumpy women make fun of the other woman and, eventually, she leaves. She goes back to her house but someone has planted a garden in it. She lies down between two rows of lettuce and stares up through the glass ceiling and waits for her dog to stop orbiting the earth.