Lee asks me what I think of a painting, if it captures the sense of ceremony we’re looking for, but all I want to do is talk about aliens.
“Canadians have collected radio signals. NASA is tracking an object from another solar system.”
“Maybe we’ll become art people,” she says. “Maybe we’ll drink French wine.”
Aurora sits on the sofa next to her, tongue hanging about, paws crossed all regal and what not. There was a flier in our mailbox, a missing dog notice. Aurora’s owners are looking for her, but she’s been ours for a couple months now and Lee is in a musical kind of love. I tossed the flier down a sewer drain without telling her about it. Someone knocked on our door while she was out and I pretended no one was home.
“If an alien race comes our way, I think I want to enlist,” I say. “I think I could get down with a cause like that. We’re all searching for meaning.”
“This is important. This is how we heal,” Lee says.
Now that she’s had a regular cycle, it’s okay for us to start trying again. Lee’s doctor told us the chances are higher now, because her body’s still housing hormones, and we shouldn’t let ourselves worry too much about what’s to come. It will happen and we will be happy. That’s what he said.
Aurora hears the garbage truck pull up to our house. She growls and shakes her mouth the way dogs do. There’s a squeal and rattle outside, a few men shout questions at one another, then Aurora’s lost interest. I start to wonder if dogs can be cyclopes, if they can handle half of the picture, or if they’d tumble sideways forever.
◆
Since Lee is feeling better, I’m giving myself permission to stay up a little later, to drink hot toddies and watch dumb movies. Sometimes I go for walks and see which of my neighbors have left their blinds open. They watch dumb movies too, and if I find something I like, we watch dumb movies together. They on their couch, me in their driveway, or their yard, or just outside their porch. Other times, I scratch lotto tickets and leave winners in their windshield wipers.
The seventeen-year-old down the street has recently given birth to a monster of an infant. He’s blind in both eyes and has a birthmark the shape of a pumpkin on his cheek. Lee thinks he’s beautiful, but I’m sure he’s a ghoul. When we cross paths while walking Aurora, the baby shuts his eyes and throws up all over himself.
We haven’t taken the time to talk about it, the fairness of it all. When it comes to the cruel indifference of the universe, I don’t know any combination of words that would contribute to the ease we’re searching for. Best not to acknowledge it. Best to take our clothes off and keep trying.
Tonight, I’m a few toddies deep and I’ve just finished Mars Attacks which turns out to be especially dumb. I’m standing on a sewer grate and there are words bubbling in my chest, somewhere between my lungs. I’m reaching for the moon, trying to remember something about perception and light, when a stroller rolls down a driveway, to the street, and falls over, empty.
◆
Lee hangs the new painting above the fire place and Aurora does not like the change. She stands on our coffee table, points her snout at the thing, and barks. The painting is one of those scenic pieces, where it’s blurry and unfocused on purpose. Where you think you’re looking at some trees, but it could be the deep insides of a fire. I don’t care for it either, but Lee calls it our “celebration,” so I tell her it looks very nice.
It’s a Saturday, so we put a movie on and stretch out over the couch. Aurora sits at our feet and Lee reads about earthquakes on her phone. I let my eyes sit on the new painting and it no longer looks like a fire. It looks more like a mutation, like those videos of how cancer grows.
In bed, she tells me about cervical mucus and its relationship to ovulation. We take our pants off and kiss a bit but I have trouble getting hard. I’m worried about the alignment of it, whether this is the optimal time for us to play. Lee uses her hand to get me started and soon we’re fully operational—missionary, for best results. I close my eyes because when she looks at me, it’s too full of hope. I bury my face into the pillow behind her. My own breath makes me sleepy.
At about midnight I get out of bed because there’s supposed to be one of those blood moon eclipses and I’ve never seen one before. I boil the water and pour the bourbon and take a tailgating chair into the front yard. A few of the neighbors are out and I raise my mug to them. The moon is only about two-thirds eclipsed and not quite red, so I drink my toddy and watch my neighbors gape up at the sky like turkeys.
The seventeen-year-old with the monster baby rolls her stroller past my house. She gives me a wave and I burn my tongue and drop the mug on the driveway below. It cracks open like the moon. Both her arms are real, which is a shame, because I’d like to pop the waving one from her shoulder and beat it against a tree.
Soon the eclipse is almost full. The moon is warm, large, and I can feel sun-like rays on my face, threatening to beam me up. My neighbors retread into their homes and the seventeen-year-old crosses the street. She holds a piece of paper in her hand. “Isn’t this your dog?” she says.
I tell her there are no dogs on the moon.
◆
I’ve taken the day off from work for personal reasons—my dick’s been hard for a couple hours now. It leans one way as if detecting a signal. After Lee left for work, I went for a run, thinking it might take my mind off the thing, but it remained pinned to my leg, limiting my movement, impeding my sweat, reminding me how close I am to uselessness.
The solution is plain as tea but my hands are tied. The erection continues in the shower and I do my best not to jerk off because Lee’s ovulation kit gave us a smiley face, and I want to give her everything.
I call my boss, tell him my body is giving me a sign, and put on another movie, Super 8, which gives me the sense that dreams shouldn’t be so mechanical. Could be the erection, but I don’t feel all that fluid these days. I’m stiff. I can’t remember the last time I touched my toes. The last time I went for a movie in the theater.
Around noon, I set the teapot on the burner and someone rings our doorbell. Aurora stands on the couch, forepaws on the arm, and barks at me like I didn’t hear it myself. There’s the soft rumble of the water beginning to boil and the doorbell rings again. I tuck my dick into my waistband and open the front door.
“Hello. Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for my dog. You may have seen my flyer?” The woman at my door is tall enough she could rest her forehead against the frame. She dangles a leash from her hand and it clinks against the gravel below. “A young woman called and said my dog might be in this neighborhood?”
I tell her I tend to mind my own business, that I don’t like dogs very much, that she reminds me of a painting my wife asked me to inspect. “If I see anything, I’ll post a picture on the internet.”
Aurora barks from the couch again, which is just out of sight through the front door. This tall woman ducks so she can look past my shoulders, but the lights are off and the shades are drawn because that’s how I watch my movies.
We trade a couple sneezes and the woman licks her teeth one at a time.
“Well, if you see anything, could you please give me a call? She’s a support animal. Answers to Bushwhacker.”
“You named your dog Bushwhacker?”
“She’s pregnant with puppies. Might’ve already had them.”
She hands me a Burger King receipt with a poorly-written phone number and I start to believe her when she says her dog is a support animal.
◆
When Lee returns home from work, I tell her I stayed home because I had an erection for most of the day. She asks me why and I don’t have an answer so we skip dinner and have sex against the refrigerator, except I’m not allowed to finish until we’ve made it to the bed and she is on her back so I carry her across the house into our bedroom and we fuck on the edge of the bed and Aurora lays on top of my feet and now it’s impossible for me to finish because I’ve been taken out of the pleasure of it all and soon I’m out of breath and we both stink and we decide to take a break which means we won’t be having sex for at least another sixteen hours.
◆
Sixteen hours later we have sex and I’ve had a couple hot toddies so I’m undistracted and capable of fulfilling my bio-duty, of making myself useful. My erection is in peak form. My heart gallops in steady fashion. I don’t hide my face in Lee’s pillow. I let her eyes turn me on, light my skin on fire. I let myself send the signal. When we finish, I feel like it might’ve happened this time.
◆
It’s the evening and Lee wants to take Aurora for a walk. I’ve grown tired of staring at the new painting so we strap shoes to our feet and take the dog outside. The moon is no longer super but it’s plenty fat. Most of my neighbors are watching television. Aurora’s doing the thing she does where she spies another living creature and presses forward like she can’t feel, like her nails aren’t digging into gravel, like the leash isn’t squeezing her throat shut.
Our neighborhood is a small loop with a cul-de-sac for a tail. Kind of looks like a six or a sperm or a nine. Aurora drags us around the loop, past the empty bank-owned house with the hole in the roof, and into the yard with the poor drainage. Once her paws find the water she drops to her back and rolls in the mud. I pull on the leash but Lee tells me to let her be. She’s got this smile across her face that makes me feel like I’m about to be arrested. Aurora eats some of the mud and a car rolls slowly down our street. Someone shines a flashlight on us but fails to capture Aurora. Then the car is gone.
“They say mercury is in retrograde,” Lee says. We watch Aurora eat more mud and squeeze each other’s hands because neither of us knows what that means but it feels better to believe it means something.
◆
In the morning, there’s a new missing dog flyer taped to the front of our door. Lee hands it to me while I drink my coffee. Across the top, someone’s written in purple marker: Bushwhacker! “What are we going to do?” Lee says.
“Nothing.”
“She belongs to someone.”
“She belongs to us.”
Lee makes a face like someone pulling on both ends of an hourglass. Aurora arrived after we lost the heartbeat. She’s been the bridge we’ve needed; the unfiltered love Lee deserves. I’ve never cared for dogs, was never one who wanted that kind of love and devotion. Seemed neurotic to me. But as we hurt, as Aurora massaged warmth back into our home, I believed. She gave us reasons to smile when smiling felt like too much work.
After a little while of nothing, I tell Lee the dog stays with us. She nods her head and refills her mug. In these in-between times, when neither of us have anything to do, I’m reminded that we’ve built a life together. The thought is so bizarre to me, but I think Lee feels it too, so we hold hands, drink coffee, and breathe.
◆
The evening turns quiet. Lee’s boobs are tender but we’ve been fooled before. She massages the top of her chest as she stares at the painting. She tells me she’s not sure she likes it anymore. Asks if we should get rid of it.
I tell her to have some patience, let’s wait and see before we make any rash decisions.
The tea pot whistles in the kitchen and Lee asks if we can watch a movie while I make a toddy. We put on Annihilation and snuggle close with Aurora draped across our laps—one little cozy family. This film is neither dumb nor familiar to me, but it does allow me to ignore a lot of what I wish would disappear. The bourbon crawls into my nose like ants and the sip settles in my stomach as folded laundry would a basket. Instead of sex, flyers, babies, or aliens, I think about baseball cards. How I wish I had an old rookie protected in plastic and hung in my garage. I think about cereal, how I haven’t had a bowl in years.
“I have to talk to you,” Lee says.
“Tell me.”
“It’s very important,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I need you,” she says.
The movie drips into an absurdity I’m all too comfortable with. My mug is empty but my heart is full. Lee and Aurora race each other to sleep and I breathe into a night-swaddling smile.
◆
The dog is barking at nothing again. It’s four in the morning and she’s howling at our fire place because it’s raining and the pitter-patter reminds her of something she’d like to eat. I yell from the bed but she doesn’t quit so I’m on my feet, bumping into the door frame.
When I rub the sleep out of me, I see a light shining in the backyard, there are sounds coming from the chimney. Aurora has her paws on the arm of the couch, her face pointed, vibrating. The light shines as if it’s supposed to be there and when I sneeze, it flickers and goes out. There’s a thump atop my ceiling. It crosses my kitchen, the guest room. I follow it to the front door. Outside, standing in my driveway, I find nothing. The rain washes away the remaining sleep.
Aurora squeezes through the cracked door and joins me outside. She sits atop my feet and growls at the roof. Down the street, a stroller rolls down a driveway again and Aurora barks some more. An engine starts. A flashlight shines from a car parked sideways and Aurora takes off towards the fallen stroller. The light finds her near a curb, sniffing the thing and licking rain water as it puddles within. I get to Aurora, and the car holds its horn for a bit. The flashlight goes out and it pulls out of the neighborhood.
When I reach for her, she does that thing they do where she places her paws on my hips and nips at my hands. She looks at me, then returns to the stroller, and bites the trays, the bars, the wheels, until she finds a good grip. She shakes her head, drags the stroller, and tries to kill the thing.
◆
As we get ready for work, Lee takes the new painting down and sets it against the fireplace. She says it reminds her too much of masks, how some people have the worst kind of eyes. I agree, but keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to say the things bubbling on my tongue.
I’m afraid the tall woman is going to break into my house, so after Lee leaves, I call my boss and let him know I need another day. He makes a crack about not needing me anyway, but I fake a sneeze and thank him for understanding.
I close the blinds and cover the small windows with pillow cases before settling into Arrival. Aurora cozies next to me on the couch. My mug is empty because I haven’t filled it. I need to stay sharp today. I wrap my arm tight around Aurora and soon she shakes with dream. She kicks and her nails scratch at my thigh and I hold her tighter.
When I was in high school, years before I’d meet Lee, a girl I’d slept with told me she was pregnant. She showed me the stick between school and baseball practice and asked me what I wanted. I told her I didn’t want my girlfriend to find out. She said that was a good enough answer for her. We didn’t talk much after that. Halfway through senior year she transferred out because her father was in the military.
There’s a knock at my door. A knock at my chimney. A horn honks outside. Aurora bares her teeth and shakes in my grip but I don’t let go. She kicks and her nails tear a piece of me away but I don’t let go. An alien shares a secret but I don’t let go. Blood runs down my calf but I don’t let go.
◆
Lee says she wants to go on a date. She says we haven’t been to a restaurant in half a year, which must be true, because I don’t remember the last time I ate anything real. I doubt she’s ovulating anymore so I take her date as sincere.
“Who will watch the dog?” I say.
“The TV,” Lee says.
Before we leave, I pretend to forget my wallet and feed Aurora a couple Benadryl gel caps wrapped in peanut butter. I kiss her snout and ruffle her ears. I tell her she can sleep in our bed and put on a documentary about evolution for her to listen to. When we pull out of the driveway, I feel like I might piss myself, like I’m losing control of the bits of me I haven’t felt in a long time.
The restaurant has too many rugs. Too many things with shapes I don’t understand. When I point this out to Lee, she tells me to pick an appetizer, but I can’t think about anything other than the tall woman. How she might smash in my windows. How she’ll take Aurora away and Aurora won’t make it difficult because when it comes to a love like that, who is anyone to say no? For a little while we’ll grieve, but we’ll tell ourselves that we are happy for the time we had with her.
My stomach sinks into my pelvis. My chest into my spine. My head rattles like a car accident.
“Lee,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“I miss our little kidney bean.”
She makes a face like I’ve given her an impossible choice, and I don’t know what my body does next, but I am broken open, and Lee is next to me, arms tight around all of me, trying to keep me together.
◆
When I park the car in the driveway, all of the sun has faded away. Lee points out her window, says she can see a constellation I’ve never heard of, and I grab her by the wrist and pull her close. I kiss her mouth and suck the warmth into my lungs. She sinks into me and my hand finds her bare knee, the loose cloth of her dress, the thin line of her underpants. My hand moves as if I’m grasping for life.
We kiss until she undoes my belt and I pull my jeans down to my knees. I’m hard enough to send radio waves, so I push the seat back and Lee climbs on top of me. Her breath is sweet with wine, her skin warm with it, too. When we fuck, I can feel myself feast, can feel my chest crack like a storm. Her hair makes a partition around my face and she tells me she’s sorry. Her forehead presses into mine, like she’s desperate to read my thoughts, but I’m not thinking anything. I just don’t want this to end. There’s nothing to be sorry about. There’s only us.
And that’s okay.
When we’re finished, I catch the shape of a person in the rearview mirror, standing across the street. They’re as tall as a tree, still as one too, and I sink into the seat low enough that Lee looks behind us. A laugh cracks out of her before she covers her mouth and asks me what we should do. I tell her to go inside and check on the dog. That Aurora might be groggy because I gave her some Benadryl.
“Why’d you do that?”
“To keep her safe.”
Lee creeps inside and I cross the street. The tall woman has her arms folded beneath her chest and the leash dangles from one of her hands. The street light casts her shadow and it creeps into my driveway, reaching. I spot the constellation Lee was pointing at before and everything feels undisturbed. The tall woman bobs her head and rubs her eyes. I wonder how long it’s been since she last slept.
“How tired are you?” I say.
“Please. Just give me my dog.”
“I’m sorry but—”
The tall woman wraps the leash around her knuckles and shakes her fist at me before turning her face to the sky and letting out a shriek. It sounds like birthing a lightning strike.
“Don’t lie to me. She’s already told me the truth!” The woman points to her left and I see the seventeen-year-old pushing her monster baby down the street. One of the front wheels wobbles and she struggles to keep the stroller straight. When she reaches us, I see she has a lollipop in her hand, her hair pulled back in a beautiful braid. Her monster baby has his fingers in his mouth, feet folded against his stomach. His eyes are open and I can see the fog of his blindness.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Things are what they are.”
Then the tall woman is sobbing. She has her face in her hands, leash loose and free, a pendulum of grief. The seventeen-year-old points the lollipop towards the side of her head, twirls it in circles and rolls her eyes. Her monster baby joins the crying and the neighborhood is full of a harmonic shriek, so she pushes him away. The baby quiets the closer they get to elsewhere.
I watch her walk away and see through a window a neighbor watching a movie. There are creatures and scientists and objects in the sky. There is terror and anguish and wonder. The tall woman sobs and when I look for the constellation, I don’t see it anymore. Then my front door opens, and Aurora is at my feet. Her tongue is all about, her nose is curious. Her eyes lull with sleep, but something familiar keeps her awake. When I look back, Lee stands in the doorway, holding a couple of mugs. She shrugs, as if the choice isn’t ours to make.
“Bushwhacker!” the tall woman says. Her eyes shrink into lines. She bends down and lets Aurora lick her tears. There’s a brewing kind of violence in me, but it never quite boils. I want to yank the dog away, shut her inside, but I don’t. Instead, I slink away and cross the street until I hear, “Wait.”
The tall woman stands upright. Her eyes are clear. The leashed hand sits under her chin and she stares at Aurora as if she’s lost her train of thought.
“This isn’t my dog,” she says. “This isn’t my dog.”
I ask her what she means, but I don’t know if it escapes my mouth.
“What happened to my dog?” she says.
Something about her softens, her posture falls weak, and she steps away from Aurora, into more direct street light. It glows about her, absorbing her shadow, sucking the will from her body. She reaches for the sky, shakes her hands, and says, “Please.”
I meet Lee at the door and Aurora follows us inside. We hover about, unsure what to do next, of what the universe expects from us. The woman looks like she might collapse, so I shut the door, and once everything is locked, the three of us drift to the bedroom window. We find the moon. We find the light. We watch the tall woman sink into stillness. She lowers her hands to her side; her chin falls into her chest. The street light flickers, once, twice, and she’s gone.