By CORY BEIZER
Before my mother can return to her life and stop watching me eat, she says she must give me a dog. She swears a companion is the only way she’ll feel safe leaving me alone. It makes no sense. How can I take care of a dog if I am failing to take care of myself? She says that’s the point, to learn how to care, and if the dog dies, well, then she’ll know when to come back. I tell her no. My beloved cow figurine is companion enough. Its thick apotropaic horns will fend off the evil that is sure to return.
The days recovering at home drag on, distinguished only by small occurrences. My cork yoga mat arrives, a bird injures himself on the kitchen window, and my mom finally beats me in Catan, breaking my five-day winning streak. The next morning she comes home with a golden retriever. A designer dog whose former owners, a shriveled British couple, said they were “unamused by.”
“I don’t want the dog.”
“Her name is Smith,” my mom says.
“But that’s my name.”
“Exactly. No more loneliness for Smith.”
It’s a cryptic thing for my mom to say, to refer to my disorder as isolation. She never veils her words like that, but I notice it’s hard for her to call my disorder by its name.
“Hello, Smith.”
The dog stares back at me the way a statue gazes at you in a museum, with intimidating distance and cool disinterest. She has a Parisian aesthetic. Long, tawny horsehair that appears coiffed yet effortless. Tip tap. Her paws clink across the floor as she slips past me and sails up to sit in the big red chair. Her graceful movements generate the idea of a perfume, one that a thin woman in a silk suit would spray on to drug men.
“She seems disinterested,” I say.
“You’ve only just met.”
I squint my eyes in consideration.
“If she stays,” my mom says, “I’ll book my plane ticket today.”
“Will you pay for her food?”
“Food is on me. Forever.”
A year prior, when I was twenty-three and my limbs had flesh, I decided to move to Phoenix to be with Bruce, an amateur bodybuilder I’d met online. I told my mother I was leaving to experience the desert, a necessary change from Vermont’s imposing mountains and overly cheerful hippies. My mother took a week off teaching to help me move in. My lease began in July; I didn’t know any better. By the time we arrived in our rented truck, it was 119 degrees out. Everything melted. Borders and edges dripped. Gravity seemed visible, an eroding accumulation of weight. The air appeared microwaved.
We stepped inside and the carbon monoxide alarm blared. Its batteries needed to be replaced. My mother volunteered to go to Walmart while I unpacked. She came back with red marks all over her neck. Welts.
“The parking lot was full,” she said, “so I had to park far away. Toward Home Depot.” She described exiting the rental truck, unsure if the tires were going to melt. “It only took three steps to start sweating.” Then, halfway to the store, something bit her neck. A tiny sharp pinch. She flinched and swung her head, but the culprit was faster, biting the other side of her neck. The invisible army grew stronger, boldly invading her nape. “It was an assault.” Furious, microscopic insects, feasting on an unsuspecting prey. The siege only ceased when she entered Walmart and felt the air conditioning dry her eyes. In her phone’s camera, she assessed the damage. Red oval ouches incised into her neck, the same shape as her earrings. No insect was at fault; the culprit was her danglies, which had heated up to a knife point. My mother doesn’t wear earrings when she visits me anymore. “Beauty is frivolous in an oven.”
I watch my mother enter her mileage number online, then choose the middle seat. “Better me than someone else.” She’ll stay for one more week, departing on Sunday. A lot can change by then, but nothing does. I still eat ungodly amounts of olive oil with the thick tomato soup she makes, and Smith and I still tolerate each other’s presence. I binge The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, enraptured by the endless alliances and backstabbings and strange reconciliations that can ensue among a group of six women. I know everything is produced and manufactured for mass consumption, but each season I find one moment that makes the whole binge worth it. A moment of unveiling, when one of the women ceases to be “herself” and enters a very short, catatonic, depressed state. Her tight face will sag; her voice will drop low to a deeper tone than ever before. Perhaps she will utter a throwaway word like “oh,” then look somewhere beyond the camera. The look of a lost child, desperate to be found. Though only lasting seconds, the moment of helplessness contains a rare humanity I’ve never seen before. I suspect these women are understanding, if only for a moment, that they are complicit in their own harm. That they have willingly signed up for all the sobbing and betrayal and exposing of truly heinous secrets. The dawning of this responsibility breaks them. Makes them glitch. In those moments, I believe these women are genuinely trying to understand themselves: Who signed that terrible contract? Who re-signed it, again and again and again? No one else talks about harm this way. Everyone blames what happened to me on Bruce. But who moved to Phoenix to be with Bruce? Who stayed with him, through thick and thin?
The day before she leaves, my mother goes to Costco and stockpiles enough food for us to withstand two to three apocalypses. The trip only takes her two hours. She says the pandemic was good practice. She slides her toothbrush into a plastic bag, then strips the bedsheets from the sofa and tucks them back into the closet. A panic seizes my torso.
“Don’t leave.”
She looks at me gravely. “Please don’t joke about that.”
“I’ll miss you too much.”
“Just pretend the cow is me. We have the same hips.”
On the drive to the airport, she makes me speak my daily routine aloud like a mantra. Wakeupbrushmyteethshower, breakfast, checkmyemailacceptsomeclientssetupmeetings, lunch, makemockupsgotothegymsenddesignstoclientsafterIcheckthatIstilllikeit, dinner, awaitapprovalcleanupthekitchenmesswatchhousewivesmaybereadthengotobed.
“You forgot: before breakfast and after dinner, you need to feed and walk the dog.”
“Whoops.”
In the unloading zone, I feel pathetic. I have no idea how to thank my mother for everything, for martyrdom. I try sobbing. I try another mantra, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou, but I know it isn’t sufficient, and I know that she doesn’t need my thanks. She needs my well-being.
I want to see her walk to the airline counter, but the traffic controller furiously waves at me to get back on the road and leave room for the next vehicle, so I leave.
When I return home, my apartment seems darker than I remember. I can’t open the blinds; the light will heat the room more than I can afford. I’m already on the third floor. The windows have to remain closed too—no wasting the AC on the outdoors. My home is dim and still. No light, no air. No light, no air. It’s hard to breathe. I rush over to the glass cow sitting on its perch in the kitchen and begin rubbing between its horns in a rhythmic motion. A sense of relief flows in, like a light stream entering my head. The palm-sized statue is milky and bulbous, a modernist take on the cow, more conceptual than realist. Its black spots are inky, its two horns a chocolatey brown. The cow’s face has a blank expression, as if it already knows all the evils of the world and has accepted them. I continue making circles around the horns, applying and releasing pressure within each circuit. When I was a child, my mother massaged my head the same way. She has thick fingers and used them to knead my temples, tenderizing the stresses of a world I thought couldn’t get worse. Her touch soothed me, and in fifth grade I asked her to teach me her magic. She said I needed an object to practice on, so we drove out to the dollar store and I chose the cow because it reminded me of a cookies-and-cream milkshake. From then on, whenever my mother would rub my temples, I would rub the cow’s horns in tandem. A mini massage train; a happy place that halted in eighth grade. In the context of my friends’ first kisses and gropings, it felt childish to be touched in a way that wasn’t sexual, so I abandoned the ritual and forgot the cow in my closet. My mother brought it back to me ten years later, when I was in the hospital. She placed the cow on my lap. “Try and remember little Smith, before all this started.” Reaching over the hospital bed, she rubbed my temples, my skin paper-thin, while I rubbed the cow, who was sturdy and reliable as ever.
Tip tap.
Smith makes herself known. “You’re right,” I say. “I almost forgot about dinner.” I open a can that smells musty and dump it in the bowl on the floor.
I remember Zooming with a dietitian in the middle of my decline. She had a forgettable moon face like a medieval peasant. I told her I was training for a marathon, had a decreased appetite, and was rapidly losing weight. She asked if that was a problem. I said I wasn’t sure. She asked where I lived. I said Phoenix.
“Oh! You should know, the hotter it is, the less we eat—our body’s amazing unconscious effort to cool down.” She changed her virtual background to an anatomical drawing of a man’s digestive system with a cartoonish pizza slice hovering in his gullet. She explained that as we digest food, some of its chemical energy is released as heat energy, a warmth our bodies absorb. “If it’s hot outside, your body doesn’t want to be hot inside.” She spoke with a singsongy cadence. “Your body craves stability, which is why we have decreased appetites in the summer. It’s called the thermic effect of food.” She spoke the last part with great emphasis, like a presenter at a planetarium. Perhaps she was trying to make “the thermic effect of food” sound revolutionary, but it didn’t need the embellishment. “Weight loss in the heat is natural. Don’t worry about it.”
I smiled. She asked me if I worked out in addition to running. I told her I worked out every day. Sometimes twice. She said I had the sunken-in bone structure of an athlete and instructed me to consume twenty grams of protein immediately after exercising.
I texted my mom after:
Saw dietitian. All is normal.
She texted back:
Hm. Mailing you weight gainer shakes. Drink twice a day please.
My mother didn’t need to ship any shakes. Bruce already had thirty loaded deep in his fridge. He called them his “battalion” that helped him maintain 260 pounds. He chugged the thick vanilla liquid at each of his six meals. Six eggs at 8:00 a.m., a tub of Greek yogurt and cottage cheese at 10:30 a.m., three chicken breasts at 12:30 p.m., two turkey and sweet potato sandwiches at 3:00 p.m., a sixteen-ounce steak at 6:00 p.m., and a bedtime snack of three bagels slathered with almond butter at 9:00 p.m. The strict timing of his meals struck me as ritual, and after enough time dating him, I saw his pursuit of bodybuilding as religion. Sundays were holy, consumed by meal prep. He’d spend hours alone in his apartment standing over his drug scale, weighing each food to the gram, proportioning the protein, carbohydrates, and fats. He packed forty-two meals into plastic containers and stored them in his industrial-sized fridge, a huge utilitarian gray box that made the rest of the appliances seem irrelevant, as if the space was a laboratory instead of a kitchen, and the food you made was in pursuit of a larger, noble scientific goal. “The body isn’t made in the gym,” he would say. “It’s made in the kitchen.” His meals were inedible to me. Too much salt and unmixed, splotchy Tabasco.
Bruce openly acknowledged that his love for bodybuilding came from being an ex-fat person. He fired the word fat when he said it, dropping it like a bomb. On Instagram, he loved to post old pictures of himself frowning next to photos of himself now, beaming like a missionary. He would fidget with the lighting and saturation of his photos for thirty minutes, then ask me which one I liked better, the raw or the edited. I found the photos nearly identical, but I always tried to pick the unedited one. In real life, he’d walk around in the tiniest of tank tops. Often, we passed old women and gays who would ask to squeeze his forearms and coo, telling him he looked like a buff Jesus. He loved that, looking like Jesus. Sometimes he would instruct me to call him Jesus when we had sex, but mostly he wanted me to remark on how big he was and how I wanted him to swallow me up. Secretly I found it fascinating, how he once despised being fat but now adored being called huge. To him, there were two types of big, but I think, in a strange, roundabout way, there was some healing in me moaning over his bigness. It was like he had finally found a way to be large that was acceptable, revered even.
In truth, I did find his size sexy. I liked how he could protect me and how straight his big biceps made him look. I liked how women fawned over him and how he could lift me with ease like he was Atlas and I was a ball of light. I liked how unquestioned our roles were. He was the top; I was the bottom. He was the dominant; I was the submissive. He was the man; I was “the woman.” Our lives were defined and easy. Then he began entering bodybuilding competitions. He started moaning about how tiny I was, how I was “a stick he could break.” The first time he said it, it wasn’t true. My figure was plush, and none of my bones peeked out of the curtains of my skin. I was confused, but I figured it was some one-off fantasy. But a week later he said it again: “I could break you.” That time he forced it to be true. He wrapped his torso around me and squeezed, squishing me into a crumpled ball, penetrating me in an awfully pleasurable way. We climaxed together.
Then Bruce started saying things outside the bedroom. Vacuuming down meals, he’d laugh, “I eat this much so you don’t have to!” Even when I roasted vegetables, he found a way to snipe me. “Most people don’t know olive oil has 120 calories per tablespoon.” He tipped my olive oil bottle up with his finger, stopping the flow, smiling at me with magnanimity, as if he’d just handed me a ten-dollar bill. I resisted at first, scoffing at his attempts, but found myself, only days later, dressing my salads in lemon juice and vinegar, my face puckering with every bite. It was strange. Before Bruce, my craving to be thin was an intermittent fantasy. Sure, sometimes I looked down at my stomach pudge in the shower and fantasized about a meat cleaver slicing it flat, but those were just ugly thoughts that would fall away somewhere along the day. Bruce distorted me. When the elastic band on my sweats didn’t stretch when I put them on, I experienced an ecstasy longer and greater than an orgasm. I took two hundred photos of myself, shirtless, with a cut torso. I showed them to Bruce, who said, “I’m so proud of you.” A saleslady described me as boyish and striking. “I’m so proud of you.” It became my duty to shrink. I told my friends and family that I was training for a marathon to explain the paring of my flesh. They applauded my hard work. “I’m so proud of you.”
People like me more with the dog. They see me as a reflection of her. My face seems canine instead of hollow, my blond hair silky instead of straw. My mother, who has buzzed my hair since youth, told me I should start growing it out, but perhaps she is just advocating for change.
I become one of those people who wake up at six in the morning, the only time of day cool enough to take Smith on a long walk. She doesn’t need a leash, nor want one, so I don’t restrict her with a noose. We walk without argument. There is a mutual understanding that enjoying the scent of the morning requires little interaction, and that the dramatics of her running away or me yelling at her to heel will spoil the mood. So she walks a little in front of me, turning sometimes to check if I am still behind her. She moves languidly, as if she perpetually has two glasses of champagne in her. She pauses to sniff the sidewalks’ blooming aloe, and I sniff too.
I find her to be a respectful roommate. She leaves my shoes and socks alone, whimpers at the door if she needs to pee, and keeps me company as I make modern logos for companies in the midst of a rebrand.
The only oddity with Smith is food. At mealtime she never whimpers or barks or jumps around like my old family dog did. If I forget to feed her on time, she never makes it known. She takes her time with each meal, lapping it up occasionally when she passes by the blue bowl. Sometimes there’s food left over when the next mealtime rolls around. It seems she is never that hungry. She has somehow mastered the indomitable animal brain. I’m jealous. When my stomach growls, it still feels holy, a serene emptying, similar to how I imagine the release of the body feels during death.
I haven’t rebounded to a normal weight yet—not even close. I don’t feel prepared to see another drastic change, even if it’s positive. But, at the very least, I eat whenever Smith eats, if only to not be rude. We’ve developed a little symbiosis, and occasionally, when she finishes her meal, she’ll watch me finish mine. It’s the first time a dog has ever looked up at me while I’ve had food and not wanted any for herself. She seems to understand my situation.
One morning, we witness a particularly soft and creamy sunrise during a walk. I bend down and stroke her back for the first time. She pauses, allowing me to comb her once more. Golden threads of fur release into my hands. Later that day, she hops up on my couch instead of the red chair. She sits on her hind legs beside me, then, after a minute or two, lowers her head to rest on my lap. The moment is dainty, like a butterfly landing on my finger, a precious gift from above. I begin to rub her head. Slow, gentle circles.
My mother asked to visit me six months after she moved me in, explaining that she had finally saved enough. I told her no, she needed to stay away. I claimed to be busy training for the marathon, but she didn’t accept such a silly excuse. She said she needed to officially meet Bruce, to shake hands with my first-ever boyfriend. But when she came and saw my skinny frame in the unobstructed light of the desert, she sniffed out my lies like a gas leak.
“Where are your running shoes?”
“In my closet.”
“I already checked there.”
I told her I ran in Converse.
She looked at me in disbelief.
“I’m getting swallowed by work. Everyone wants a rebrand. It’s normal to be busy and forget a few meals.”
“You look like you lost fifteen pounds.”
Twenty, actually.
“Don’t be such a worrywart.” I cracked eggs in a bowl, then chopped tomatoes and onions. I took out a pan and poured the oil on luxuriously, forming a hill of sheen.
“Promise me you’ll see a dietitian.”
“If it will calm you down.” I began to whisk but tired quickly. I proved too weak, and the eggs were still streaky. My mother had to take over, make everything smooth.
The next day, when she met Bruce, she looked at him, then at me, then back at him again. Her face crinkled. “Let me take a picture of you two….” Bruce seemed delighted by this, but I knew she was after evidence she could show my sister.
“I hate pictures.”
“Don’t lie.” Bruce smiled. “You take a hundred selfies a day! Same as me.” He pulled my hips close to his thigh.
My mother shot us.
Months later, immediately after I was released from the hospital, she showed the picture to the police and attempted to file on my behalf for domestic abuse.
“He didn’t abuse me.” My voice came off as a whimper as I apologized to the hefty man sitting behind a computer. “Don’t waste this man’s time.”
She whipped her neck back and showed me her beady eyes, spasming. “He abused you.”
“Eating issues are not under our jurisdiction,” the officer droned.
“Well,” she huffed, and drove downtown to his apartment. Outside where she parked were carpets of sunbaked grass turning to straw. Summer was approaching.
“Stay here,” she instructed.
I only looked for a second. Bruce stood in the doorway. His spine s-ed into a slouch; his face wore a puny expression like a guilty puppy. My mom, erect, stern, full and thick in her shoulders and chest, cast a great shadow on him. She was stabbing him with her pointer finger. “You,” I imagined her saying. “You poisoned him. You almost killed him. My baby.” I imagined her grabbing his face, holding the entirety of it in her palm, her sharp nails painfully close to his eyes. “If you ever come back, I will kill you.”
I wasn’t present for the murder. I was at the grocery store, buying Greek yogurt for breakfast. Zero fat, zero sugar, zero artificial sweeteners. The yogurt comes in a serious black container, and eating it makes me feel more like a man. I like to envision the protein turning into muscle as I consume the white streaky dollops. The yogurt is fine when I walk in and drop the grocery bags in shock; it stays safe in its sealed container. Nothing else is fine. The cow’s head lies decapitated on the floor, severed from its body. Its blank expression now looks haunted, as if it predicted this tragedy all along. I pick its head up, jagged and sharp, a skull instead of a face. The surface where the head has split from the body is bristly. A toothy edge slits my finger open, releasing the smallest specks of blood. Only one horn remains on its head. I can’t find the other.
The rest of the body has shattered into shards disguised as sparkles on the floor, vengeful little knives I worry will stab me each time I have to go into the kitchen. Each shard will want revenge for a lost wholeness. A lost innocence. A deep sense of injustice perforates my chest. How could the cow possibly have fallen? Tip tap. Smith. Tip tap. Smith is responsible. Tip tap. Who else? Tip tap. Tip tap. It couldn’t have been the wind; the windows were closed. Tip tap. Tip tap. Tip tap.
“You.” I squint at her, not recognizing her as my own. “You are a bad dog. No breakfast or dinner for you today. No. You’re a bad dog. A bad, bad dog.” She doesn’t deserve it.
I leave her for the day, too disgusted and betrayed to be in her presence. I go into the office for the first time in months. Two coworkers tell me I look good and ask what exercise program I follow. I feel a stirring. A rush. I tell them I’m training for a second marathon. It’s as simple as that.
I return home at 8:00 to find Smith sitting at her food bowl. She stares at me, then down at the emptiness beneath her. Her eyebrows arch up into a puppy-dog look, expecting me to pity her. “You don’t deserve it.” Smith’s stomach growls, prompting mine to bay in mimicry.
She paws the bowl, causing it to wobble.
“Shh!” I slam the bowl still with my foot. “Stop.”
Eventually everything falls into disorder. That was what my physics minor taught me in college. When I met with the dietitian, I wanted to explain the law of entropy to her. That the chemical energy of food we consume is low-entropy, and the resulting heat energy we produce is high-entropy. I think about it constantly. That in order to live, we must break down the universe that was neatly packed for us and shit out disorder. How burdensome are we as humans, endless consumers.
I wake up and immediately know I was wrong. Sweat coats me in a layer of disgust, and my sheets bear the evidence. The apartment is warmer than usual, but I can hear the AC blasting. I get up and find the door to the outside is open. I must have forgotten to close it during my rage. I thank the universe that no one has robbed me, that no Gila monster has found its way up the stairs into my home. I don’t deserve good luck; I’m a shitty dog owner. I fill Smith’s bowl with three cups of kibble and two huge scoops of peanut butter. “Smith!”
No tip tap.
“Smith?”
I search, but my apartment is small, nowhere to hide. The door was left open, and Smith is gone. My guts flip, and acid fills my mouth.
Many states have a law declaring that it’s illegal for dogs to be tethered outside for more than thirty minutes if it’s above ninety degrees outside. I check my phone. It’s eighty-eight degrees outside and only 7:00 a.m. In two hours, it’ll be one hundred degrees. Today’s high: 116.
Days before I was hospitalized, I told Bruce I wasn’t feeling well. My ribs poked out like children behind a corner. He advised me to get fresh air, “enjoy yourself.” I picked up a book and changed into oversized clothes. My arms each looked like a single laser beam coming out of my shirt. How striking, I thought, like a runway model. I hobbled to Hance Park, determined to prove to everyone—including myself—that I felt as good as I looked. I lay down in the impossibly green grass and felt cushioned. The sun happily toasted my skin into a strudel. I was at peace; the ground and the sky sandwiched me into something delightful. Hours ambled, and I drifted in and out of reverie, dreaming of simple things. Snow, the soft smell of a birch, a strawberry… then everything collapsed. The blades of grass stung, pricked my skin and pinched my spine. The sun’s gentle baking had shot up to a broil; I felt the heat bludgeon me. I placed my palms on the ground to push myself up, but my elbows were thin bands, and my arms wobbled and crumbled. In disbelief at my weakness, I tried again, but gravity had me pinned. Again, failure. My surroundings began to blur. I cried. I stopped. I needed to preserve the liquid. Liquid. I needed liquid. Near me was a two-tier water fountain. One spout for humans, the other for dogs. I crawled on all fours to the lower tier and jammed my knee against the button. The stream was lukewarm, almost hot; still, I lapped and lapped. A smiling dog capered over, panting, perhaps hoping for water, perhaps hoping to play. I shoved the dog hard. Shoved her to the ground. I needed more water. I knew after that shove I had enough strength to get up. And I did: I stood up, called my mom.
“Help.”
I sprint outside, screaming her name, waking up neighbors who think I’ve gone crazy, shouting and looking for myself. I drive around, swiveling my head, scanning furiously. I try to think like a dog and predict her path, but all of my guesses are wrong. I go back home and construct a shrine on top of the red chair of all her favorite things: peanut butter and a red aloe flower. I pray. No one answers. My thoughts turn on her. She never liked me; she was just using me for food. Smith is the real antagonist. Her abandonment is for the best. I never wanted a dog in the first place.
Then, on my phone, an emergency alert. WARNING: EXTREME TEMPERATURES. AVOID OUTDOOR EXPOSURE UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. I’ve seen the alert before, at least thirty times this year, but the emergency aspect hasn’t registered until now. I imagine Smith’s body lying out on the concrete road, twitching, the sun baking away her moisture, dehydrating her like jerky. I collapse, sobbing, shaking. I only meant to starve Smith temporarily. A tiny punishment. I never intended any real harm. Never.
I begin to bargain with the universe. I promise to spoil Smith rotten. I promise to donate all my savings to the ASPCA. I promise to never skip another meal. I promise to reach out to all my friends and apologize for ghosting them. I promise to quit my job and become a nurse. I promise to get rich and buy my mother a house and take care of her for the rest of my life. I promise to find a way to help all those poor Real Housewives women. I promise to set them free. I promise to never get back together with Bruce, but, somehow, I promise to forgive him. I promise to forgive myself too. I promise to try.
My mom picks up at the first ring.
“I lost Smith.”
“What?”
“I woke up and she was gone because I left the door open and I looked for her for hours and I screamed her name but now it’s too hot and I’m sure she’s somewhere flat on the road baking dying of heat exhaustion starving.”
“It’s okay, Smith. She can handle herself out there.”
“No, but—” I choke.
“Dogs are smart. She’ll return.”
“No.” My throat feels dry and insufficient. “I didn’t feed her yesterday.”
“Ah.” Her tone hardens. “Why?”
“She broke the cow. Decapitated it.”
“You saw her do it?”
“… No.”
“Smith.”
“Don’t judge me,” I say.
“Did you eat yesterday?”
“Please, don’t judge me.”
“I’m booking a plane ticket back for tonight.”
“No, Mom, please, please. Just listen to me.”
“You did something bad, Smith. You are not bad. Okay?”
All I hear is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
“You called me pudgy as a child.”
My mother, silenced.
“I remembered it in therapy. When we dug down to the earliest memory, to the root of the issue, it was you. You called me pudgy.”
“Don’t do this.”
“One time, after swim practice, you grabbed my shoulders and slapped my belly, hard. You said, ‘Someone’s getting a little pudgy.’ Do you remember that?”
“Don’t do this to me, Smith.”
“I was an eleven-year-old with a pudgy problem.”
Her voice drops low, to a deeper tone than ever before. “Please.”
She returns to me that night. Standing backlit in the doorway, she looks fragile. I know in my gut—the heart of the stomach—that I should have never told her that pudgy memory, even if it is true, even if its consequences are real. In the end, I am her child and owe her my life.
“Mom.” I have no idea if she now blames herself for the whole thing. If she does, I doubt she will ever tell me. She won’t want me to worry about her.
I offer a hug.
Without fuss or reluctance or any other dramatics, she accepts, rubbing my back in little circles. A great, familiar warmth.
Smith saunters in, resolute and aloof as ever. My chest crumples forward in exhalation. The breath of relief sounds like: Yes. Smith is alive. Uncooked by the sun, fleshy and healthy.
My mother tells me she saw my neighbor walking Smith outside the complex. He said he’d emailed the building asking who Smith belonged to and no one responded. “You didn’t get her a collar?”
“Sorry,” I manage.
“Well, he said Smith got along with all three of his stuck-up cats.”
“I told you, she’s a cat-dog.”
I face Smith.
“Smith!”
She makes no move to be closer to me. Smith is not my mother. There is no maternal soft spot that makes her quick to forgive. No long history for us to fall back on. Really, I know nothing about Smith’s history. Only that she has been given away.
“Smith, look, I made you food. Peanut butter and kibble. Steak tomorrow.”
She has a blank expression on her face, unsure whether or not to trust.
My mother begins to unpack; the sheets come out of the closet.
“I won’t do that again, Smith.” I lower myself to the floor to be on her level. The tiles feel cool on my skin, spreading goosebumps.
“Look—yummy food.”
I hold up a glob of peanut-butter-coated kibble.
“Mm, yum!”
I put one in my mouth to show her it’s good. Slowly, I nibble. The dog food is chalky and has an old meat flavor, but the peanut butter is delicious—sticky, and goopy, and fatty.
“Mmmm. Tasty!”
My hands reach for more. Two, four, five pieces toss into my mouth. I chew with purpose, accepting the graininess, relishing the grease. After I swallow, I sweep my tongue along my teeth, searching for any creamy forgotten bits. I want it all. I grab another handful and squish the pieces together into a big ball. I lean in for a hearty bite. My teeth shine with oil; my throat becomes saturated with sustenance.
Smith watches me eat until I am full.
Cory Beizer is a Californian writer working as a partner at The Environmental Storytelling Studio. “Smith” is his debut story. Currently, he is hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, investigating stories of wildfires, loss, and regrowth up the American West Coast.
