The Clearing

The Clearing

The Clearing 1920 1440 Marie Ryan McMillan

(CW: the dog dies)

March: Juneau, Alaska

The dog paced his cage; brown fur bristled along his backbone like it was electric. Like he was electric.

He limped; a bald, jagged scar marred his hind leg. He grumbled in the back of his throat like a cranky old man. Or an alienated teenager with a skateboard. The closest she could guess for his breed was a wire-haired terrier and Great Dane.

“If you take him, you’ll need to sign up for training,” the shelter worker said. “And no kids around him.”

 She nodded. “I have no kids.” The words stuck in her throat and she coughed. Mother had been her primary identity for so long. 

The shelter woman said, “Because this is a last chance dog, we’ll need to check your references. We don’t want him coming back. Or biting anyone else. You’d be responsible if he did.” 

 Marlie flinched at “being responsible” for anything, especially another living thing. The three-page application demanded answers to questions she didn’t want to consider. Who would be in her house regularly? How much money did she have? Had she ever given up a pet? What would she do if the dog got sick? Could she afford vet care? What would she do with the dog if she became sick? 

What if?

What if?

What if?

 She hadn’t filled out an application to get pregnant 31 years earlier, though she had nothing to document then besides outdoor gear, clothes and a boyfriend who disappeared before the baby arrived. All people had done then was wish her luck.

Then she waited. To be declared fit. To be the right one. To be approved. A poster read “Keep wild animals wild. Leash your pets!” Dog paraphernalia lined the counter: chewy things, leashes, nail clippers. A rainbow striped collar caught her eye. Rainbows led to pots of gold. Rainbows said the sun was battling the rain and had a chance of winning. 

 An hour later, she and Mongoose left; she, carrying his paperwork, he, sporting a muzzle and the rainbow collar. He drooled. He walked as far from her as he could. Anger pulsed through the leash and up her spine. The space between them overflowed with his need. But maybe the need was hers.

It was sleeting.

******

He liked Beecher’s medium cheddar. Cheese would lure him out of his crate so he could alternate between terror and rage. He sniffed the house and glared at her, sure she intended some fresh hell, but all she had was sharper cheddar. 

Three times a day she walked him by the beach on a leash. “He’s a jumper,” the shelter lady said. “He jumped a six-foot fence at his last placement, and that’s how he ended up biting the kid.”

He barked at waves like they were attacking him. As much as he hated their house, he hated being out more. But they walked circle after circle. Around and around.

Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Thirty was the minimum time the doctor suggested. “Lots of people see improvement in their depression with exercise,” she said, filling out the prescription. “Sometimes dogs get people out more.”

****

Mongoose sniffed at the only closed door in the house. He wasn’t curious, but when she put her hand on his head to lead him away, he swiveled and snapped at her. All he got was her pinky, which wasn’t bad because who really used their pinkies for anything? She wrapped it in a paper towel and then dropped cheese in his box. When he went after it, she slid a plastic tote in front of the closed bedroom door.

*****

“Marlie, are you sure?” Janet pressed.

“Yeah, you know, it won’t be forever. This is an edgy time for Mongoose. He was so abused in his first home. It’s hard to get over.” 

Janet snorted. “You, my dear, were not the one who abused him. Why are you stuck home with him now?”

“I’m sure I can help him. He’s making so much growth. Pretty soon I’ll be able to come over. Right now, I just can’t leave him.” A low growl, his default state, was too quiet for Janet to hear. Fluttering in her heart reminded her she was scared. Of the dog? Of Janet? Of everything? There was no way to know. 

 “Ok, here’s the thing. Everyone’s coming. And it’s been a year, honey. I’m worried about you all alone.”

 “I’m not alone. Mongoose is here.” She tapped at the countertop. 

 “Mongoose is not a person who understands grief. Mongoose is not a person who knew your daughter.”

 “Maybe two more weeks. Janet? The trainer thinks he’ll be much better then. I owe him that much.”

 “How is it you’ve convinced yourself you owe this dog anything?” Janet said.

******

The trainer suggested they try a walk in the neighborhood. “Before you go, give him half a Trazadone. Take his edge off,” she said. 

She didn’t like Trazodone for him. She hadn’t liked it for herself either; instead of taking it, she shut up about not sleeping. Because she had seen no one in a few days, there was no one to tell anyway. She tossed a THC gummy into his box and he swallowed it whole. 

The wind was bitter. His fur was thin. She wanted to put him in a dog jacket to protect him. But when she tried, he lunged for her. That bite had hurt. She pulled her sleeve over the scab on her hand. She didn’t need to hide the marks he’d left on her calves; it was too cold to wear shorts. By the time summer came to Juneau, they would be healed. He would be healed. They would be healed.

Lots of dogs walked the trail near their house. As they climbed the stairs to the road, he seemed bothered by the metal under his feet and the splattering of rain on his back. A car zoomed by with a golden dog in the backseat, nose out the window. His ears flapped in the wind.

The damn dog in the car wore a bowtie.

It happened fast. Mongoose stiffened, flashed his teeth and the hair on his back stood up. He leapt toward the car, writhing against the leash. Marlie widened her stance, crouched and held on. It was slick, but she stayed upright, and the car disappeared. Mongoose fell quiet.

He turned toward her, deflated, tail dragging. They walked home, and she ate a gummy herself.

*****

 “Michael says you haven’t been there yet,” Janet said.

“I know. I’ve just been so busy.” She shoved the dirty dishes around in her sink. She needed dish soap. And vegetables. And toilet paper.

“Michael needs to move out of the apartment, honey. He doesn’t want to live there anymore.” 

Marlie said nothing.

“Can you hear me? You get this, right? He can’t go until Emily’s stuff is out.”

And laundry soap, she thought, looking at her stained sweatshirt. And Band-Aids, she thought, looking at the bite marks on her hand.

The dog glared at the ocean. A sea lion’s head bobbed 50 feet out. Mongoose threw himself at the window hard enough she thought it would crack. He yelped.

“That dog is not worth it,” Janet said. “He’s a fucking nightmare. I’m afraid he’s going to bite you.”

“He’s actually really sweet when it’s just me,” Marlie said as Mongoose bashed his skull against the glass again.

****

She piled dirty laundry on the tote blocking the door. How long had the door been closed? A week? A month? A whole year? It was only to keep from heating an extra room; heat cost money. Keeping that door closed was logical and normal, she thought. Keeping that door closed did not make her crazy. It meant nothing at all.

******

She leashed Mongoose and walked to the road. She hadn’t given him the THC; if they were going to make it, they needed to just do it. Her heart thumped in her eardrums; both their breaths frozen in the air. 

She would do it. She would save him.

His back swayed by the burden she rested on it and her arm was taut, trying to hold on.

At the trailhead, a dozen kids poured out of two mom vans. They screamed and slopped around in too-loose rain boots. He looked like he’d forgotten children existed and was unhappy to be reminded. His rage rumbled through his leash. They needed to move. Quick. 

She yanked him down the stairs. Startled away from the kids, he snarled and lunged at her legs. Something warm trickled down her calf, but she kept pulling. His silence scared her, like if he didn’t bark, he didn’t let out steam, he would explode instead. She had to get to the bottom. But he was wild and dodging and pulling and she tripped over him, tumbling the last few stairs to the ground.

For a moment, she didn’t have limbs or veins or bones or skin. She was terror in a human shape. She forced her hands back into being and realized she wasn’t holding his leash. Mongoose hadn’t noticed; he stared at her on the ground, his eyes steel. Help her or kill her; he could have gone either way. The kids clumped down the stairs. She threw herself on his leash and dragged him off the trail into the woods. He skidded through the snow, resisting. 

 “Are you ok?” one mom called down. “Did you fall?” 

 “He’s not friendly. Please keep the kids away,” Marlie said, calf deep snow, trees and shrubs grabbed her feet. Mongoose crouched, heat and musk pouring off him, a lion ready to pounce. The silence was heavy and terrifying.

The moms barreled down the stairs and hauled ass up the trail, a blur of backpacks and raincoats.

The adrenaline soured in her stomach, and she leaned over and vomited. She kicked snow over the mess, and blood from her leg speckled the little mound. 

*****

She slid the tote and the laundry away from the door. Mongoose slept in his crate. She pressed her hand against the door. It was cold. Quiet. She wanted to open it, to clear the air, but she couldn’t grab the knob. Moments passed, then more, and then she slumped to the floor, pressing her cheek to the ugly laminate. Mongoose snarled from the other room, awake.

 She crawled away. She didn’t want the dog to see her there. 

*****

“Do you have a plan?” Janet asked.

 “For what?”

 “Michael is bringing her stuff to you. Today.”

Marlie knew this. 

“Maybe he won’t come for a while,” Marlie said.

 “He moves out tomorrow. It’s coming. You need to go into that room and get ready.”

“Well, I need to walk the dog. I’ll get ready after.” The wear of being trapped in the house together day after day was showing. They both smelled bad. She’d run out of soap and so she only rinsed in the shower. And there was no way she could get him in the tub.

He chewed his fur on his front leg. The skin beneath was raw and oozy. She tried to get the discarded hair from his box, but he bared his teeth when she put her hand in. 

Even though she left the door open all the time, he came out only to eat or go outside. He didn’t seem angry anymore or hate her. Mostly, he didn’t acknowledge she was there. He didn’t notice the sea lions boiling the water out the window.

Maybe he’s sick, she thought. A vet could treat him. That would be the thing to do. And since he didn’t come out of his box, she could just close the door and he’d be ready to go. She probably could drag him up the stairs and into the car. She picked up her phone to call for an appointment.

And then she set it down.

Maybe tomorrow.

Mongoose slept squeezed at the back of his crate. She leaned into the box. The floor beneath her knees was Juneau-spring gritty, a mixture of road sand and glacial silt. She laid down on the grit and put her head right next to his box. His breathing was slow and regular. A bit of a squeak on the exhale. She tried to match her own breaths to his, but he breathed so slowly it made her anxious and she gasped for more air. 

The dog snorted and went quiet. 

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

******

The ping announcing Michael delivering her daughter’s stuff was nothing special. Not clearer. Not louder. Just the standard chirp, saying something absolutely normal was about to happen. 

She didn’t answer the call, and messages piled up on her home screen.

The door was impossible to look away from. Maybe it pulsed, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t true. She was barely breathing as she put her hand on the doorknob and turned. 

Just then, Mongoose hit her from behind and blasted the doorknob out of her hands. He bolted into the room in a tangle of fur and area rugs.

It was the first time he’d run in weeks.

In Emily’s room, he shot under the bed, looking for something. He tore through the bedding on the floor, leaving a blur of light blue and white stripes. 

“Get out of here!” Her voice was bigger than she expected, and it startled them both. It was possible she hadn’t actually spoken to him in days. He looked her in the eye, then lunged for the stuffed rabbit on her daughter’s bed. Emily carried that thing around until it was bald and they’d stitched all the limbs back on at least three times. The rabbit drooped from his mouth like its neck was broken.

She ran across the room and grabbed for the rabbit, but he was not letting up. They both pulled, and with a shredding sound, the rabbit tore apart. White fluff spilled out onto the floor and stuck to his eyebrows. She coughed from the dust, then sat down on the bedding.

She’d made it into the room.

Most of Emily’s things were gone, at the apartment she shared with Michael for years. He’d be arriving with those things any minute. She held the rabbit’s empty hull and crawled into her daughter’s bed. Mongoose laid on the rug below her, his tongue still fuzzy with the toy’s innards. 

****

They drove. He’d rarely ridden in the car; he sat in the way-back of the Subaru. Halfway there, she realized she hadn’t turned on the radio. She’d never done that with her daughter; it had always been a battle between NPR and some twangy country music she hated for its unabashed sorrow.

After twenty minutes, she pulled into the trailhead. Empty. Midweek, early afternoon, barely spring. But people had been there the weekend before. It was all over Facebook. A lone wolf, big and grey-black, had been harassing dogs hiking with their people. Not like the wolf years earlier called Romeo, who had his own plaque and fan club. Romeo sought dogs in a way that made people pose their chihuahuas to get pictures of them playing together.

This wolf messed with dogs. One had only escaped because the people had screamed bloody murder when the wolf clamped down on the dog’s back. The fish and wildlife people had stapled a notice to a tree.

“Your own risk.”

“Potentially dangerous.”

“No recourse.”

As if those words only described a wolf, and not every single day.

She popped the back of the Subaru. Mongoose sniffed the air and snorted. Shook his head. Cocked his ear. He put a paw out of the car, and even though his chewed-up leg had to hurt, he jumped down. She didn’t leash him.

She didn’t know if he would follow her, but she started up the trail anyway. 

He jingled behind her. When her daughter was little, her husband tied a bell to her coat’s zipper pull; ringing it gave her something to do while they hiked and it kept the bears away. But its real purpose was to assure them she was there, still moving.

After five minutes they reached the runout of an avalanche chute several seasons old. The snow was nearly gone. Across the clearing and near the foot of the mountain, a shimmer moved through the trees. Mongoose’s ears perked and his nose twitched. He stood taller and stiller than she had ever seen him.

He nudged her hand. Almost like he wanted to be petted, but he yanked away when she tried. She reached under his snout and unhooked his rainbow collar. It dropped to the ground and punched into the snow. 

He shook hard, lifting his front paw off the ground. The shadow across the meadow shifted, fading in and out of sight like magic. He looked across the meadow and then up at her. His eyes, which had always been quick, were instead deep and thick. She nodded; he sneezed and stepped off the trail. 

He bolted, and she was sure her heart would stop beating or beat so hard she would explode, but neither happened. She just kept breathing in and out. In and out. She fingered the remaining pieces of the rabbit in her pocket. She took out one ear, knelt, and dug through the snow. Her hands and knees were icy when she finally clawed the ground. She couldn’t feel them as she wiped the tears and snot from her face, but she could feel the mud hardening on her cheeks and forehead, encasing her. She stuffed the ear in the dirt with the rainbow collar.

She could have waited, but she didn’t. Waiting wouldn’t matter now.

It would snow that night. She didn’t turn around when she heard the barking. Or the howl. Or the snarling. Or the yelping. She bent over at the waist and held herself together with only her frozen hands pressed to her stomach and vomited into the snow. 

When she got back in her car, a message flashed on her phone’s screen. Michael: Where the hell are you? I have your boxes.

The boxes were hers now. Of everything else, she couldn’t be sure. She would fit them in her house.

There were no cars in either direction. She swung onto the road, headed back toward town.

Photo by Anslee Wolfe.

Share This:

Leave a Reply

Close Cart
Back to top