A Light Touch
Fiction Friday
Emily resumed her walks in the park when the dog bites healed. She took her faux leather sandals along the shaded paths for the first time in what felt like years. Shut up in winter, there was an odor to the house that had crept through her cuts and lay annealed beneath her skin. Hot summer rains and green lawnmower smells brought her to life. The park paths were like rugs she beat with the soles of her sandals, her cleansing walks.
Pepper bit her in November, scared by all the movement in the house: Roy packed up for college, Dad with a new job and poker friends over often, a new neighbor that called at night for Emily to answer. They had been away for Thanksgiving and Pepper had been with the neighbors. It was all too much, and Emily did not notice his ears and tail curled where he was backed into a kitchen corner. Trevor’s voice through the receiver had all her attention. She reached idly to pet the dog and his teeth sank in. Pepper was not a big dog, but scrappy; he growled and swung his head like he was ripping at a tough roast. His muzzle was matted pink and brown with blood where his nose touched the pet carrier grate on his way to be put down. He was an old dog — a good dog, Emily’s father said mournfully as he drove. On the phone, Roy, two states away, hardly reacted to the news. He asked how Emily would continue band practice and she said she wouldn’t.
Afternoons in winter were awful. She helped with dinner two days a week, stopped after undercooking the roast beef twice, relegated to chopping salad. On snow days she watched television. Trevor the neighbor boy hadn’t called in weeks. She discontinued her walks in the park across the street. No Pepper to walk and the cold was a tall fence around the house she had no desire to climb. She lay about by rattling radiator heat and tried dozens of home remedies for scars. The trapped up smell of the house weighed on her. She put a towel under her door and did homework with a scarf on, the windows up. She burned candles other times so her parents wouldn’t think she was wasting heat.
For two months her wrists were covered. The stretchy pink bandages loosened as she wrote essays at school and she imagined them like bangles or the hanging jewelry of a Nile queen. She thought wearing the bandage after the bite healed would make people think nothing had happened at all. But other kids asked to see the scars and Emily began wearing long sleeve sweaters and huffy looks to keep them away.
Sleeves were too hot for summer and on her walks now she wore t-shirts. That winter smell had gone from the house and her father even talked about getting a new dog.
Roy came back with his big red suitcase and stayed for three days. At dinner he asked to see Pepper’s collar. We hadn’t kept it and he got upset. Roy didn’t finish supper and sat in his room that night. It was like he had been waiting all three days to ask and expected a different reply. By morning he was on a train, dropped at the station before Emily was awake.
Roy didn’t like her going in his room, but the house was empty when she woke up and she needed to be convinced that he was gone again. There was a closed up smell in his room, like he had been there ten days and not three. Emily opened the window to allow morning air inside and leaned on the sill waiting for her parents to return and place the car back in its spot on the driveway.
