Page 58 - WTP Vol. XI #6

The Package (continued from preceding page)
mother to smile and laugh as she passed the box to the daughter, hand to hand, identical hand to identical hand because of genetics. Then Caroline heard her own voice over many months, calling to Ramón, Come on, Baby Dog, do you have any ticks? He hied himself to beneath the bed to avoid inspection. Do you need something to chew, Baby Dog? Baby Dog, Baby Dog Ramón. But hadn’t she called him that because when they got him he was a Puppy? And a Baby Dog is a Puppy? And not because he was her Baby? The dog as surrogate child, to Caroline, was for thinking about slant-wise, not for expressing, verbally or otherwise.
Wishbone the stuffed terrier had glass eyes; with such
an imagination, Wishbone didn’t need to see. She took
a lesson from Wishbone and turned her imagination away from her eyes, to a scene of her mother and sister shopping the aisles of some big-box store for the perfect present for Ramón the nephew and grandpuppy. Then they found Wishbone! And they were so jolly when they found the dog that had its own armchair! They would have laughed and guffawed and even had to lean on each other because of the belly laughs that were just this side of making you have to pee!
~
After Ramón had sniffed the stuffed terrier all around and upside down, he was not afraid of it. Then he chewed on it, first breaking the stitching that held the folded ear in place, then working a small hole in its left back foot. She was relieved to see he had not chewed a hole in the right back foot, or the right front, for those were places of his own injuries. Such a correspondence would have been unnerving. Still, he was tearing something apart, and she left him to chew on it and went upstairs to find a distraction.
When she came down again, small bunches of polyester fiberfill lay scattered on the braided rug. The terrier had already weighed very little, little more than no baby at all, and soon it would weigh even less.
She left Ramón at his chewing again, went to fold
the sheets in the basement, and while she was down there in the damp, she was all the time hoping that Wishbone would explode.
“The Package” is excerpted from a novel Under Canine, ten pages
of which were published in On The Seawall, October 11, 2022, as ‘Under Canine (outtakes)’, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Clouse lives in Iowa City; her work, under her proper name as well as Zed Ander and Zaarcluz, has also appeared in The Iowa Review, The Prose Poem, Essays in Medieval Studies, and Mystics Quarterly.
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