Page 68 - WTP XII #3

Quiet Questions (continued from preceding page)
repeats the motion. The warmth and compassion radiating from his dark brown eyes is hard to deny and she isn’t sure where or when she ever picked up an inkling to want to do so. To want to insert genet- ics and science and the survival of cuteness into the space where only feelings and love feel appropriate. Feelings and looks she never fought against when they came from someone human. She built a life around those feelings and looks. She and Dee could have been just as happy and in love if they’d never so much as uttered a word.
Anita immediately catches her reverie, the thing she’s already grown weary of doing, the thing she never liked about anybody else’s grief or coping or contin- ued compromise—glorifying the dead, making them and you and the space they occupied that of saint- hood. When the truth is the two of them had come near to blows—verbal anyways—about the dumbest shit sometimes: paving stones, picture heights, paren- tal visits.
Anita finds she’s been gently coaxing Bruce’s thin little, sharp little chin bones this whole time, in her semi-daily process of bringing Dee’s ghost back down to earth. She cocks her head to the left, giving him her own silent inquisition. He mirrors it. She laughs and scratches and ruffles and finds him looking even more inquisitively at her, chin persistently pressed into her thigh. His look encroaches on desperation and it’s too much for her.
“Alright, alright,” she says, standing and watching his tail start to crank hope into his little body until his butt wiggles with its force and his back feet start to dance to the wiggle. “Alright,” she chirps, reaching a hand down he meets halfway with an eager butt of his head. “Did I say alright?” Bruce gives a brief but overwhelmingly excited howl and takes his dance to a level that has the rest of his body helpless but to fol- low his butt into a spinning hop.
“Lemme get presentable,” she says. He gives anoth- er yelp as though this is the best idea anybody’s ever had.
Three steps from the bedroom, the thought, ‘For who?,’ is running through her head. It drops right in front of all this nice momentum. The suddenness of the thought makes it feel as though the walls of her world are closing in, while she’s somehow the one outside, pushing. She has to physically shake it off while emotionally reaching back for the momentum.
“Who cares?” she says out loud, giving it the force it needs to crash through and fully gain back her mo-
mentum—their momentum. “Who’s gonna see me anyways?” she salts in, just to make sure.
Bruce jangles up and joins her at the bedroom door. He sits ever-so-patiently just on the other side of the threshold, staring. She gives him a thorough eyeball- ing when she gets her turtleneck down over her head and he remains motionless, patient, his telepathy working unperturbed and unflinching under her scrutiny. She tugs at the wide collar of the turtleneck and looks towards the window, realizing she has no idea what the temperature is like outside. It’s that time of spring that rotates dealers with late winter and early summer. All three sitting at the table. It’s clear and blue and hard to tell, which makes Anita leave her leggings on, and pull thick socks from her top drawer.
As she pulls them on and follows with boots, she watches Bruce, still in the doorway, still waiting patiently.
“I think you might just be a good boi,” she tells him, high pitched, babyish and entirely unashamed. This merits a sweeping wag of Bruce’s tail along the boards of the floor. “Are you?” She says, checking to make sure that he is, in fact, voice-activated.
Boots on, Anita slaps her thighs, pushes off them and gets herself to standing. Some adventurous churn- ing in the deep middle of her feels like a glow. Feels really good. Feels like a first. Feels like if she thinks about it too much she’ll be pulled back by one of those waves that took up most of her morning. Most of her months.
“Let’s go! You wanna go?!”
Bruce goes from tail sweeping to upright, to bounc- ing on his feet and twirling.
“Who wants to go?!”
His excitement builds with each new question. He finally turns and points himself like some furry mis- sile towards the stairs and the front door and the outside world.
She looks at him, his head now turned back over his shoulder, showing patience but thrumming with ex- citement. Anita feels the glow in herself rise up from its center and spread. A pull she’s helpless to fight. She practically falls on him, arms around his chest and shoulders, her face pushed into the side of his neck. He presses his muzzle back into the top of her head—some wise and compassionate gesture. She asks again if he’s a good “boi” while wiping at tears
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