Doggy
This is what is going to happen
When I was four, I had a dog. Listen. I had a dog. And this dog was fireproof. I tried setting him on fire, but he would not light. No matter what I did, he would not catch. I doused him in gasoline and held a lighter to the pool under his paws. The gasoline burned, but the dog did not.
In primary school I would ask the librarian if she had gotten in any more books on sharks or dragons, and she would tell me no. So I checked out the maximum number of books I was allowed at one time, which was three. Books I had already read. My parents’ yelling would interrupt my reading and make it hard to concentrate on the words because I couldn’t stop my attention from deviating when my ears heard the yelling, and then I would have to restart a few sentences before the one I had been reading when my ears heard the sound of the yelling. But I discovered that I could wrap the long pillow that sat at the very back of my bed, closest to the wall, around my head so that it covered both of my ears, and I could read that way.
Juice pouches are very unsettling, because when you drink the juice inside the pouch becomes so small as to be almost gone, like you drank the body of something.
I rode a bike I had found in a junk yard a few times down long roads leading out of areas with houses next to each other through fields before some boys, who were on bikes of their own that didn’t look at all like they were from the junk yard, knocked me off of my bike that I had repaired, because it had only had one wheel and no tires when I found it, and kicked me on the ground and took my bike. One of these boys went to the same school that I did but I did not recognize the other two boys. Every time I checked out a book from the library I liked to look at the rectangular card inside the pocket pasted to the inside cover which had the names of the people who had checked out the book before me. Some of them were written in pen, but most were in pencil. Many of the names had been written by people who had better handwriting than I did.
There was a small window in my room that I looked out of, and I could see the street that our house was on. Some people had dogs and I would see them walking the dogs. My dog was fireproof. During one of the times I was looking out of the window a boy threw a baseball that hit the house of the old man who lived across from the house that I lived in, very close to the pane of the window nearest to his front door. If the ball had hit the glass or hit the pane of the window it would’ve broken the glass, and probably the glass of the entire window and not just one quarter of the window, the quarter the ball hit, because the windows of the house across the street were not divided into four panes of glass by pieces of wood like the windows of my house were, and so the glass would be so shaken by the ball hitting it and the whole big piece would shatter, if the little boy’s ball had hit it, which it did not but came close to doing. The old man came out of the house quickly, which made sense to me because I could see from my room across the street, which was called Burrow Drive, that he was sitting in a chair in the room on the other side of the window, but I only saw this after he got up out of the chair because what I could mostly see from where I was was movement, so when he got up out of the chair and the chair rocked back and forth I could see that all of a sudden and I knew that he would be at the door quickly. He made the boy, who I could only see one hand of because the other was inside of a brown baseball mitt, snap a thin branch off of a tree in his yard and bring it to him. The old man laid the little boy over one of his knees and hit the little boy’s bottom repeatedly with the stick that the boy had given him from the tree. I couldn’t hear the little boy’s cries from my room, so I cracked open my window at the bottom. Then I could hear the little boy. He sometimes would choke while he was crying, I think on his tears going down the back of his throat, which tears can do because the mouth and the nose are connected and when people cry out of their eyes their noses start to cry too, which is why men use tissues when they cry, on the times that they do use tissues. Women use tissues to touch the tissues to the makeup around their eyes, and also to blow their noses. Men only use tissues to blow their noses. Listen.
The dog would become distressed when I poured gasoline onto it because it was wet and it smelled very strongly. Dogs have senses of smell that are much more powerful than people do, and gasoline smells strongly to me, so it must have been very strong for the dog, who would start making small noises but not move very far away, maybe because I was the only human that it knew. I had found the dog in the junk yard like I had found the bike. It had curly light black hair.
Sharks are interesting because their skin is directional. If you were to touch a shark one way they would be smooth and slippery, but if you moved your finger in the opposite direction the skin would feel rough. Sharks are hard to catch because they are slippery and they can sense electromagnetic fields. They have been the same for many millions of years. But the ocean is becoming more acidic.
Kids at the church that my family went to on Sundays were put in a separate room from all of the adults, who were in the main big room that had one big colorful window. The room had white walls that had scuff marks on them in some places that I always noticed and I would cock my head to the side when I looked at them, which is something I was aware that I did, and it had a brown carpet. All of the kids that came to the church were in the room with a man called Mr. Arnold who talked about the Bible. I thought that the Bible looked small for a thing that was so important to so many people who were at the church, but I never said this to Mr. Arnold because I did not want him to address me directly.
Sometimes the only thing I would see out of my window for long stretches of time were animals like insects and birds. I had never been in my father’s room, but I knew that he had an air purifying or white noise machine in there because I could hear it.
The librarian for the primary school that I attended as a child lived in a two-story house in town that wasn’t structurally unsound and didn’t need to be repainted, which was uncommon. I knew this because I followed her home after school one day that she had told me she didn’t have any new books about sharks or dragons. I walked two blocks behind her and she did not know it was me. She had a husband but I did not see any children in her house through the windows. The cracks in her street were different from the cracks in the street that I lived on and I became stuck staring at them and could not look away. I was scared that the librarian would see me outside of her house and come outside to speak with me. A woman I had never seen before came out of her house and asked if I was alright and I told her that I was O.K. and that I was doing a science project. I got a feeling inside that she was pretty when she was younger, which was the first time I ever had such a feeling about an adult woman in my life. She offered me a glass of water and I told her that I had to go to the junk yard, and then I realized that I was looking at her face and not the different cracks in the librarian’s street and I turned around and walked away from the street making sure not to look back at it. She said something as I moved away and I started running, which made the lower part of my school backpack bounce away from my body and then crash into my lower back and upper bottom over and over and over.
He seemed to feel some of the heat around him because he would start to pant with his tongue out.
Dragons are reptiles, which means they are more closely related to birds than they are to mammals or to fish. Dragons fly and so do birds, and sharks are fish. The boy and his bike burned in a way the dog did not. I liked it to be absolutely quiet when I read about dragons and sharks, or when I read anything else, but my favorite things to read were about dragons and sharks. I did not like how many people were in one place when they read the Bible at church because reading is something you do alone. In the room that wasn’t the big room in church with Mr. Arnold my big brother would squeeze my skin very very hard and I had to make sure not to make a noise because if I made a noise he would do something that was worse when we got home from church like lock me somewhere, which was the scariest thing that he could do and so I was very quiet in Mr. Arnold’s room in the church, even when he said things about the past that made me want to ask about sharks because if I asked Mr. Arnold a question my big brother would have to stop pinching me when Mr. Arnold looked at me while I asked the question, and then when he had answered me and looked away my big brother would pinch me even harder than he had been pinching me before. There was no big cross in the room like the one in the room with the colorful window so Mr. Arnold brought one that he said he had made at home.
I saw a TV screen through a window of a store in town and on the screen was a fire in a forest and it was the most fire I had ever seen.
The librarian and her husband went into the bathroom together before they went to bed even though the bathroom was small and the husband had to be extremely close to the window in order to fit both of them in there while they brushed their teeth and splashed their faces with water. After the bathroom they got into bed and each read a book before they went to sleep and I wondered if either of them were reading books about sharks or dragons that I hadn’t read, which made me feel a feeling that I don’t know a word for. There were never any people in the junk yard at night except for a few times I saw someone sleeping there but there were always dogs. There were also raccoons and possums, which did not get along with each other. Listen I saw big thick airplanes drop red dust onto the fire so I found red dust and put it onto the dog after I lit the gasoline but it just made him do what I think is a sneeze for dogs.
This is what is going to happen
The building that I work in does not have any windows because my supervisor said it is ‘standard regulation practice’ for Department of Water and Power buildings not to have any windows. In the summer there is one hour of sunlight before I must be in the building and when I leave it is night time. In the winter I see the sun on the weekend. I mostly spend my working time at a desk but I’ve learned some engineering/maintenance since I began the job at the Department of Water and Power and I occasionally accompany coworkers to pipes and valves. My favorite snack is a Snickers because I enjoy the taste of chocolate and caramel and a whole full-size Snickers is somewhat satiating to eat at a desk. The first day of my job I was told that I could not eat the Snickers I had brought because someone in the building had a nut allergy, so I now clothe the snack bar in the wrapper of a different brand of snack bar before coming to work and I pretend that I have to use great force in opening the wrapper because I want it to seem like the wrapper is sealed even though it is not. Once my supervisor, who looks like a pug and has many of the respiratory problems that afflict pugs, told me that I was a good worker but that I should ‘try to be more social’ with my coworkers. He did not read before bed.
The dog is old now for a dog.