How I Know Mother Loves Me
Yesterday, I drank a fruit fly steeped in a warm mug of milk. I know I swallowed it, because I felt a feathery tickle of six tiny, disconnected legs in my mouth, and a meaty film coated my throat. On the rim of the cup, the fruit fly left behind a clear wing like a paper-thin fingerprint.
All its friends bother me afterward; in the absence of their eldest, they have lost all sense of etiquette or hierarchical control. They spin in small, dotted rings around my fingers and pepper my rice with the tippy-tap of black feet. Often, they sit in a neat circle around my mug and take turns spitting in it, rubbing their thin hands.
At night, they are lured into sweet puddles of dish soap by the sink and quietly drown. In the morning, their soft, gray bodies create constellations on the stone countertop, and I count them, one by one, moving each from left to right like a dead fly abacus. When I find two coiled into one, poisoned mid-mount, I get confused and have to restart my count from fly number one.
By day twenty-three, I have counted a total of sixty-four dead fruit flies, of which forty-three had been found by the sink, eleven on the windowsill, six by the urn, three in the jewelry box, and two in my underwear drawer. When I report my findings to Mother, she looks at me cross-eyed and smacks my forehead with an open hand. She then exposes what’s inside: a black speck in the center of her palm.
“And that makes it sixty-five,” she says.
Please Walk the Dog
On the first day of my husband’s absence, the dog learned to walk. It began by perching on the armchair and waggling its forearms in the air like a baby. Unlike a baby, however, whose eyes are dizzied and devoid of aim, the dog’s eyes were unblinking and glinted in the dark. I messaged my husband, THE DOG HAS BEEN DOING WONDROUS THINGS. No response. I turned around just as the dog wheezed knowingly and slunk away.
At first, the dog did not have the strength to stand. From the other room, I would often hear the thud of a furred object falling. Just once, as I crossed the hall, I caught a glimpse of it shuddering in the doorway. There, it attempted to raise itself by bracing against the frame, but its hindlegs crumpled and it lay unmoving. I thought of the last time I had fallen. Last month, after a plummet down the stairs, I had lain at the bottom in an embryonic heap, feeling the dog lick my bloodied cheek. Upstairs, my husband had been buttoning his dress shirt. He buttoned it, one by one, before walking down the hall and making his appearance at the top of the stairs. The pain of absence was difficult to measure. Did you count it by the rate at which he slowly descended or the duration that he remained silently watching? Sometimes, I felt that his gaze was even more impenetrable than the dog’s, whose gaze was glossy and unsuspecting.
The warmth of a dog’s eyes was determined by the size of their irises. They filled each rounded corner of the eyes, tucking away the whites so that they remained invisible. This absolved them of the suspicious quality of human eyes, whose irises—ringed with white—were piercing and resembled circled targets. The chocolate button eyes of a dog required no calculated aim; they reflected nothing but the reciprocate other, like shiny, thoughtless pebbles.
On the fourth day of his absence, however, I saw that the dog’s irises had begun to shrink, or perhaps, the whites of its eyes had started to grow. I could sense it watching as I made my calls or fried my eggs. Perhaps it was learning how I remained standing for so long, or how I switched seamlessly from the position of sitting to the position of walking. When I looked back, I saw it watching with those human eyes, ringed with the faintest trim of white, as if the lids had slowly peeled back. I recalled how my husband used to peel a tangerine by slicing a seam into its belly, curling his fingers into the dripping wound and pulling it apart in two clean halves. He would then pluck each slice and place them, one by one, into the palm of my hand. These days, he had developed a habit of eating them alone and leaving the empty shells in small, equidistant heaps on the corners of his desk. Each night, I would count, one, two, three, four. . . .
I found comfort in this form of counting. Later in the day, when my husband called to tell me that his business trip had been extended for another seven days, I preoccupied myself by pacing in clockwise, concentric circles, one circle after another, on the living room rug, just to see how many I could draw before I exhausted myself. When one circle had been properly trodden into its surface, I took a step to the right and began another. I felt like a child drawing geoglyphs in the sand, unfazed by the wind and ravages of time. I felt that I could not stop until I had taken a final count of circles or perhaps until the dog had finally learned to walk. Then, it would no longer inflict me with its nightly repertoire of falling or the sound of its pained panting as it waited hopefully for my approach. Sometimes, when it chose to fall in the middle of the night, I would hear a faint whispering, like debris rattling in a prehistoric windpipe. Sa . . . ra . . . Sa . . . ra. . . .
On the tenth day of my husband’s absence, I was frying my eggs when I felt the rhythmic shudder of someone’s approach. A tall shadow fell over me and landed its tip upon the soft yolk of my egg. I turned, and in the doorway stood the dog. Before I could call my husband’s name, a call that would go unanswered, the dog cut the distance in clean, straight strides, so that he stood right behind me. At full-length, he was taller than my husband. He towered over me, his torso extending like a dark wall, then tapering into the sharp peaks of his ears. His eyes were so high above, I could only see two slivers of white and the two black coals embedded deep in the centers of them.
He gently took the spatula from my hand and flipped the egg, right on the brink of it burning.
***
Illustrations by Mushaboom Studio
