In a voice too low to wake anybody by Katherine Plumhoff

Let’s say your father got dogs after your mother died, and because the dogs were there you didn’t feel as bad about not going home, so you didn’t, just twice a year, once during the summer so you could get a dripping cone of Blue Moon like your mom used to buy you on the last day of school, and then once in December near Christmas but not on Christmas — that you spent high on the couch in your empty apartment.

Even during these limited times you were home, you couldn’t ignore the bad shape the dogs were in: matted fur and plaque-lined teeth and nails so long they clicked when the dogs slunk around the house because they had adopted a kind of sideways gait which put more pressure on their ankle joints and less on the paws themselves, where the overgrown nails, yellow and curved like witch’s incisors, couldn’t be cut, because the quick had grown out so long that if you tried to snip them they’d bleed hot red blood, and the dogs, being hurt, would moan, and your father would know that you thought you knew better than him, and he, being hurt, would not speak to you for four days or until your visit ended, whichever came first, and you’d stay away for even longer until the next visit, but then you’d come back and the dogs would look even worse.

You’d wait until your dad was asleep on the stained khaki couch, then take the dogs upstairs into the bathroom as quietly as you could where you’d trim their nails millimeter by millimeter and de-bur their ears gently, snipping out the mats you couldn’t untangle with a pair of embroidery scissors your mom used to use that made the same sound as a smile, and you’d feed them Dentastix you’d stolen from the bin at the grocery store you went to for vegetables — green bell peppers because they took the longest to go bad and carrots because the dogs liked them, too, both hidden deep in the crisper drawer, underneath the bags of gnocchi your dad would microwave and mash against the roof of his mouth for his only meal of the day around 4, after he’d napped and finished his second pack of cigarettes and before he started the third — and the dogs would never bite you, even when you only fed them the Dentastix bit by bit, slipping your fingers past the lacey gray edges of their lips to check how loose their teeth were getting.

Let’s say that on this last visit you found fleas jumping like popcorn from one dog to the other, scattering red welts across their skin and leaving them to scratch their bitten ears with their overgrown nails so hard they bled, and even after you snuck the dogs into the bath and massaged anti-flea shampoo into their fur and calmed them when they shook and rubbed them dry with the musty blue towels that your father had brought from the old house — the big one with the pool that he’d bought for your mother so she wouldn’t miss the sea — you could still see the little bugs crawling along their skin, could feel them on yours, and you calculated how long it was until they could get the treatment again — 48 hours — and when your train left — tomorrow morning — and how much money was in your bank account — $35.94.

And let’s say, let’s just say, let’s say just to each other just here, in a voice too low to wake anybody, that you googled the number for Animal Control and read about what you had to prove for them to be able to take the animals away and then you clicked on images and saw big dogs in small cages and then you looked at the framed picture of your mother on her wedding day in the bathroom, a picture your father had brought from the old house and propped behind the electric razor he hadn’t used in months, and so you locked your phone screen, and you hugged the dogs close to you, and you left them upstairs in your room while you ate gnocchi and watched Antiques Roadshow with your father, and you went to sleep with them on your bed, waking up to scratch the flea bites that dotted your shins like capital cities, and before you left the next morning to walk to the train station, you told your dad you loved him, and he said, “Me too” before lighting a cigarette and letting the dogs lap from his coffee cup, their tongues going white with cream.

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KATHERINE PLUMHOFF — Katherine is from the Great Lakes and now lives near the ocean. Her short stories and creative nonfiction can be found in Litro, Heavy Feather Lit Review, and Off Assignment. Reach her at @kplumhoff or katherineplumhoff.com.

Art by SYLVAIN DAUDIER — After studying comics in Brussels, Sylvain started working in communications and advertising. He worked as an artistic director, graphic designer, and illustrator at agencies in France and Belgium. At the same time, he always tried to keep his personal creative space free to experiment and create while having fun. Sylvain’s influences range from literature to cinema, with such artists as Lovecraft, Poe, Burns, Vernes, Lynch…