Daughter of the Dog

(Originally by Yellow Taxi Press, 2018)

"Come on.” The words are raw against Jen’s throat. One more lap around the village. Her hand teeters towards her pained ribs before she glances at her all-weather, all-terrain digital watch. Thirty-two minutes. That’s all? Jake would be so pissed if he knew she was out again. Caught unaware, she stumbles over a tree root.

Sometimes she marvels at how often this body fails her.

A worm-eaten signpost for picnickers and dog walkers marks her usual halfway point. Quickening the pace, her fringe swat against her squinting eyes. Somewhere behind her, an over-stretched hair band must be lost along the leaf-strewn footpath.

Trying to ignore the stitch building in her abdomen, Jen makes a daring bolt up a steep muddy slope and disturbs a blackbird in a puddle. As wings hasten to the air, Sid, the black-and-tan German shepherd, vaults into a clearing ahead, throwing his head from side to side in excitement.

He’s Jake’s dog really—although Sid has tolerated Jen well enough since she developed an obsession for jogging. Even so, in the last few weeks, he’s been moving with a distinct waddle at the back end. Jake has even made a few concerned comments about maybe scaling back his food. Not confident to make those kinds of decisions about somebody else’s pet, Jen has never sought to get involved. Anyway, the vet said one-and-a-half of the little scoops should be fine. So, the weight gain remains a mystery, really.

For a while she and Sid pad along quite nicely side-by-side. When they come to the shortcut that leads back home, he springs eagerly out of step with her. There are more trees on the hill. Last night’s rain has licked them to a Marmite shine. Some of the smaller ones, drenched in shade, have a showy leopard print of frost running up the bark. That will probably vanish in a minute in the struggling March sun.

Jen had sex in this stretch of woodland once. It was when she was sixteen. God, was that really twelve years ago now? It was with a friend from school. Her first. They’d stumbled along this footpath on the way home from the pub, giggling, and then stopped by the children’s play park and jammed themselves into swings too small for them.

After their mild bout of madness in the dark, they’d slotted right back in to being silly: kicking at the warm leaves; opening their mouths to catch sour raindrops through the canopy. It was a mild night, on the tail end of summer. Like most things in summer, the rain didn’t last long. He’d asked to be her boyfriend afterwards, but she wasn’t looking for anything serious.

Jen might still have photos from that night, taken earlier at the pub. Friday night pie and mash; her larger-than-life school mates squeezed into a booth, brandishing cheap yellow shots. The crowd of them often aggravated the older locals. If the photos have survived they will be jumbled in a shoebox with the others, ferreted away beneath paddleboards and pop-up tents, somewhere behind Jake’s mountain bike and a stockpile of bleach.

Mementoes of a looser time, when the pubs didn’t ID, and young people’s hangouts were open to her as an escape. There was one particular photo which she and her friends had laughed over heartily, if she’s remembering rightly: Jen caught in an explosive peal of laughter, cider spurting out of her nose. Round solid thighs and tits galore.

Jake hasn’t seen many pictures from her teenage years—only carefully selected ones in which Jen resolves she doesn’t look so hideous he will leave her. Just after she’d married Jake and long before the miscarriage, she’d confided miserably over the phone to her once best drinking buddy, Keeley, about how inadequate she felt: You should see the women from his old life, Australian beach babes, the whole lot of them. 

Keeley had emigrated to Ireland some years ago, and was now busy juggling full-time social work with motherhood. Not unusually, she had been distracted with no less than four other tasks when Jen had last called. “Never time for a rest break as a working mum,” she’d pointedly reminded Jen at least twice within ten minutes. Then had come the rapid chitter of Keeley-style laughter that prevented a dig from being outrightly condemned as a dig. It reminded her of that time Keeley had murmured, Nice to inherit the house, though, eh? not long after Jen’s mum had died.

Of course, Keeley had done her best to muster up some enthusiasm for the most depressing subjects, such as Jen’s job search troubles, or the fact that the best universities were too far away to consider doing a part-time course without uprooting completely. At the subject of Jake’s gorgeous Aussie friends and exes however, Jen’s slot in Keeley’s timetable was apparently up. A moany scuffle sounded down the other end of the line, followed by the shrill pitch of a toddler wailing. The sound of the kid crying brought a clump of blood to Jen’s temple: Mummy, Simba’s stabb-ed me wiv dis clarws! And now dit’s BLEED-ING!

“Can I call you back, love?” Her friend’s fraught voice had become slightly breathless. “Sorry, got a bit of a situation going on over here. And you know, being cooped up together in this tiny house makes it impossible to concentrate on anything for long! Thanks, love you loads, bye-eee!”

They haven’t spoken since.

Splashing through a shallow puddle, sudden cold shocks Jen’s ankles. The dank weedy earth forces her to slow to an unsteady jog. Starlings have woken up, and the canopy is a clumsy panic of winding and weaving. Jen raises her watch to her nose, then wipes specks of mud off it. She jealously imagines Sid panting into the kitchen through the over-large doggy door, creating huge brown paw prints that she will have to clean off the tiles later. The luring vision of a steaming kettle, and huge shapeless slob clothes tempts her towards giving up—

“Come on. Just ten more minutes.”

Hmm… are you quite sure, Greedy Goose? It’s not like you to stick at anything with any level of commitment. Not unless there’s cake involved!

Jen frowns at the unwelcome voice in her head. Greedy goose is definitely a falsely perky and ridiculous term her mother would’ve liked to say to strangers to win their smiles. Or else, if given a frustrated and belittling edge, the same phrase could easily have been targeted at a weight-conscious daughter in private.

Jen hadn’t given a speech at her mother’s funeral. She wasn’t sure if anyone had expected her to. Uncle Merve had done a good job lifting the mood with a few tasteful jokes, and everyone else who’d had a go at profiling her mother had said she was a cheerful fighter right until the end. The dearest lady they’d ever known.

The sky beyond the village green is brightening now. Blood-pinched clouds rise like pink elephants, while the dwindling echo of church bells announces a new day. Soon overly keen dog walkers will begin to appear, or holidaying hikers with their ridiculously tall walking sticks and waterproof trousers. Off to scale a mountain, one might presume.

Jen never used to dread the risk of bumping into other people. But that was before the sympathetic tones had started creeping in, as well as the judgemental looks. Her thin body is too accentuated in stretchy running shorts.

Sometimes she wonders if it would’ve been better for both of them if she’d just left her mother to the care of strangers all those years ago. Escape to uni, as her friends had done. It would mean that she wouldn’t have met Jake, though, who she had bumped into on the snowy church path one late afternoon, when he was home visiting his parents for Christmas.

Jake’s mum, Hollie, still lives close by and is a rosy-faced and overly attentive character. Annoyingly, she’s always trying to fatten Jen up during family dinners. And it’s only gotten worse since they lost the baby. Hollie works at the village bakery and keeps unloading boxes of soon-to-expire cakes onto her and Jake’s porch, along with supportive notes: A fleeting visit from an angel leaves footprints on our hearts forever.

Although these gestures are no doubt well meant, somehow that doesn’t prevent them from also translating as entirely infuriating. Jen can’t help but view the baked goods as an act of sabotage cooked up between mother and son. Overly plump pity doughnuts, spying eye jam roll ups, and suspicious apple turnovers with secretive, concealed custard. She dumps most of them into the bin.

She hates herself for it, but she also often imagines Hollie and Jake having nasty conversations about her behind her back: Hollie saying supposedly casual, yet awfully poignant things like, “Your wife isn’t an overly emotional sort of person, is she?” and “Remind me, love, was the baby planned or a happy surprise?”

At home, the shower sputters into life, spewing out hot spray which Jen swiftly alters to cool. For some reason Jake always likes the shower to burn his skin—a yearning for his sunny Australia, perhaps? Steam circles dissipate as Jen traces over the sharp points of her hips and elbows. Once she’s done washing, she steps out onto the wrinkled floor mat and quickly swaddles her body in a thick lavender towel. Combing her hair into small, precise sections, she scrunches each one singularly to coax curls, and checks her progress in the mirror above the sink as she goes. Still scrunching, she moves into the bedroom.

Perhaps it should feel more pathetic than unnerving to find herself in a stand-off against an object. And the dark slit between the farthest wardrobe door and the frame isn’t even that, really. It’s just empty darkness. Nothing to fear. Treading softly across thin carpet, she reaches out with one hand to nudge it closed.

A dry bubble forms in her throat.

Something there, weakly luminous in the darkness.

She tugs open the door, and the bubble erupts into a flood of panic.

Neatly folded on the middle shelf sit a plump pile of baby onesies, all shed of their plastic coverings. His finger marks are still there, long sorrowful drags in the fabric. That’s not even the worst—“Oh, God!”—the cot, the beautiful sleigh style, lily-white cot. Jake insisted on buying it new, not second-hand. And now it has been unboxed. One skeletal side is constructed, resting against work shirts and Jake’s favourite camo jacket.

Jen can’t, or is unwilling to comprehend what this means. Shoving the door closed, her heartbeat throbs unhealthily in her ears. Her gaze jerks toward the small bedroom window, where brightening yellow rays are now deceptively coating winter. Through the whirlpool of fear, faintly there is Sid clicking along the hallway toward his bed downstairs. The rubbish old dishwasher, which Jake keeps accidentally setting to intensive wash, makes a dry clank, like a chain striking the bottom of a pit.

She squeezes her eyes shut, trying to block it all out.

Can’t she just exit adult life for a spell and go back to that tipsy teenage night with the boy in the woods? The clumsy way he kissed her. The taste of fruit cider. The nervous bob of his Adam’s apple. She wants to relive the way she took control for once, making sure it was her hands moving his, her body on top. A forest nymph, half-naked, skin glowing bright under the moon. She’d forgotten how good that felt. With Jake, it’s always been him captivating her.

This way the two of them have been pretending to cope for so long now—it’s no good. Thoughts of the funeral, the last baby scan, the pity cakes, the school friend leaving for a faraway college and then not keeping in touch, getting a new, prettier, Facebook-official girlfriend who actually wanted to go out with him and have his babies—It all collides in a tangle of loose ends.

She barely feels it as she flings her head over the toilet. The towel is bunched around her ankles as she retches. At intervals, guiltily, she can’t help but imagine how graceful the fossil curve of her back must look right now. The cheeky way the muscle running from her right thigh to buttock might be gently budding outwards. She heaves again, and with cool fingers she feels down her body. The hollow under her ribs. The flat, tidy make-up of flesh and bone.

Lunch may not be so guilt-ridden now that she is rid of her breakfast.

She’s dressed and downstairs before she can fend off the flicker of temptation. Stroking the kitchen cupboards in long lazy ripples, she is a woodland sprite, a hollowed-out willow swishing with purpose. Loose grouting stirs beneath her bare feet.

She finds what she’s looking for in the bin, where a stricter version of herself exiled it upon arrival.

At the sea-wave breakfast bar, Jen’s fingers stack up a gorgeously accurate doughnut Pisa. The dishwasher makes another gravel punch as she leans forwards to inhale the pink icing.

Steady.

After slowly dismantling the tower, Jen constructs a fun run of army obstacle hoops, and then, getting carried away with the thrill, a fairy house complete with spy-hole windows.

It’s relaxing to build, a mixture of child’s play and discipline. But her lower lip is quick to betray her. It recklessly pushes forwards and grazes the sugar dusting. One sweet crystal zings on her tongue.

She recoils in horror.

She’d almost forgotten about Sid, grumbling around in his muddy dreams in his bed. At her gasp, his nose rises from the blankets. He blinks at her with barely comprehending eyes.

The flat slap of the doughnut against his hairy thigh properly wakes him up. He’s already gobbled down the offering in one gulp, like a snake, before excitement kicks into his pupils. Licking all sides of his face, he sits up, looking for more.

A hungry thing, aren’t you? The voice of Jen’s mum oozes out of all the cracks between the kitchen units. Jen narrows her eyes as a long ribbon of saliva collapses over Sid’s front paw. Greedy goose. She pinches the spongy edges of the next doughnut.

Sid pines, angling his head. When her fingers purposefully dawdle, he produces a low grumble.

When the doughnut box is completely empty, all crumbs neatly cast into the sink and coated with bleach, Jen climbs into the dog-bed with Sid. Disturbed by her presence, he fidgets, nipping at her t-shirt, snorting and snuffling against her damp hair, destroying all those carefully teased curls. His belly is round and warm as she arches backwards to share his heat. Sid nudges her back towards the plastic edge of the bed, pawing at her back with his blunted claws.

Despite this discomfort, Jen relaxes into puppyhood. The blankets are like a different world, holey at the edges. The wool mix is fuzzy, crumby with soil. Everything smells of dog hair, wet grass and cured ham chews. The kitchen, from so low down, looks like a giant’s house. If she managed to fall asleep here, perhaps her unconscious mind would kick in, then take account of these scents and presume she was also a dog.

If she were to have the same dreams as Sid, what would she dream about? Where do dogs like to escape to? She wouldn’t mind returning to the same woods from this morning, so long as she could do so in a body equipped with four powerful legs. She wouldn’t mind bumping into the villagers even, so long as she could knock them down with a capable snout. While she was at it, she might knock down Hollie too. Knock down Jake. It would be thrilling to run on all fours, completely alone, through the whole village, causing havoc, and sniffing out the escape houses of her youth. Running up the hill, she would probably feel like an athlete. It might be the most monumental moment of her life.

Jen grins into wiry wool as she imagines herself hunting a deer across the green in front of the church. Sid’s warm breath is sickly sweet against her neck. It would feel fitting to think of her mother, before she would tear open the hot deer carcass with her teeth and then eat her fill.