Hide

by Matthew Griffin

  I turn the doorknob. The deadbolt’s locked, and my keys aren’t in my pocket.

  He bends down, one hand on his knee, to pour the gas, but even bent down he’s still too high up. The gas streams from the spout in an iridescent brown ribbon that misses the tank completely, soaks the motor and the tires, and, as if he didn’t just witness this, he goes and screws the cap right back on the tank and sets the can in the doorway of the shed. The screen closes with a loud crack.

  I hurry to the living room. The front door stands wide open, my keys dangling from the deadbolt. I yank them free and head out the back.

  I yell at him to stop, but either he doesn’t hear me or he’s pretending not to. I hurry across the yard as fast as I can, but I have to chop it up into tiny, mincing steps. A stride any bigger feels like somebody startling you out of the first moments of sleep, that feeling like you’ll never stop falling.

  Daisy stumps into the doorway of the shed from someplace inside it, a long bolt tucked like a bone between her back teeth, and watches the lawnmower warily, her head turned the opposite direction but her eyes trained sidelong and suspicious on it. Frank yanks the mower’s chain so hard he sways backwards, barely manages to grab the handle in time to keep himself from falling over. The mower grumbles, coughs exhaust, but doesn’t start. He yanks the chain again, harder this time, and the mower shudders to life with a dry, grating roar, and soon as it does Daisy’s bursting out of the screen door, teeth bared and hackles raised. She shoves her way between the mower and Frank’s legs, trying to protect him, and he doesn’t even notice she’s there, just pushes it rattling and smoking along the yard’s edge, where it performs its ritual duty in vain and a cloud of red dust. “Watch out,” I yell. Daisy scrambles out of the way and starts running circles around the both of them, barking so furious and shrill and high-pitched it’s almost more irritating than the grind of the mower itself, which moves through the scrubby, dry grass, too low for the blades to brush, for about ten feet without leaving any visible trace of itself before it chokes, hacks, and stops. Frank tilts it up on the back wheels, so the blades are off the ground, and heaves the chain to turn them slowly, the way he did when the grass was wet and gathered into thick clumps that clogged them, so they could shrug the clippings off into ridges at his feet and start to spin again. Daisy paces back and forth, hackles still raised, watching it. A raspy growl rattles low in her throat.

  “It’s not clogged,” I say. Finally I’m close enough that he can’t pretend not to hear, though he does pretend he’s surprised to see me, and, apparently, a little irritated. He looks all around, through the bare trees, and leans down to push in the primer on the side of the motor.

  “You ought not be out here,” he says. When he pulls his finger away, the yellow rubber button slowly fills back up and pops convex. “Ain’t no leaves on the trees.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “What else would I be doing with a lawnmower?” Just a few months ago he would have said it like a defiant teenaged boy, daring me to forbid him. Now he says it like I’m an idiot for not recognizing the machine’s intended use. “I am mowing the lawn.”

  “It’s February,” I say. “The grass is dead.”

  He looks all around, breathing scraps of cloud into the sky. They scrape wet against the sides of his lungs. To the east, the first stars are faintly visible, each one dragging the next from the darkening sky by the invisible thread that’s supposed to hold them together.

  “So it is,” he says, “so it is,” and yanks the chain. The mower starts again, a wild screech flittering now inside its roar.

  “Turn that thing off,” I yell, but it drowns me out. Daisy sprints up to the mower, gets herself between it and Frank’s legs again, and snaps at the engine, nearly tears the spark plug loose. “Turn it off,” I yell. I grab his arm, but he pulls it away. Daisy scuttles out from under his feet as he pushes the mower along the fence, onto the bald spot. One of the blades nicks a root, sends a splinter ricocheting inside the mower before it shoots out so hard it lodges like a bullet in the earth, but he just keeps on going, all the way to the corner, and there, now that she’s got it trapped, Daisy dashes at it, barking, saliva flung down in strands from her teeth. Frank tilts the mower up on its back wheels to turn it. They catch on another root. “Turn it off,” I yell. I grab his arm and try to pull it away from the handle. He tips the mower further back, yanking it this way and that, trying to jostle it free. Daisy lunges at it, snaps, and turns to run, terrified by the shuddering of the air. The handle slips out of his hands.

  The sound is the worst sound I have ever heard. The engine’s guttering grind, and the screeching blades, and Daisy’s single, pained yelp, high and short, the kind she’d give if you stepped on her paw, nothing more, and underneath it all the wet, dull thud of blade lodging in flesh, of flesh tearing.

  The mower pulls her further into it. She digs her claws in the dirt and looks over her shoulder, her mouth open like she’s crying but with not a cry coming out. The mower makes the same wet, choking noise as if she was so much damp grass, and coughs exhaust as it gives up, her body lurching with each slowing turn of the blades. Then everything’s still.

  Frank stares down in surprise.

  “Fancy?” he says.

  The front half of her sticks out from under the mower. She doesn’t make any noise, doesn’t even try to move, just lies there with her belly pooled on the ground and her forelegs flat to the earth, bracing herself against it. She looks up at me, panting, panting, like if she could just draw in enough air, just catch her breath for a minute, she’d be all right.

  “Is she okay?” Frank says.

  A thick edge of blood unrolls from under her belly, spreading across the dirt toward her elbows, then past them. She leans down and smells it, as if she doesn’t already know what it is, and what it means.

  “Get her a biscuit,” he says. “That’ll make her feel better.” But you can tell from the wavering of his voice that even he doesn’t believe it.

  “Go inside,” I say. “Now.”

  “I’ll just get her a biscuit,” he says.

  “Go inside and stay there.”

  He shuffles back toward the house, stopping to look over his shoulder every few steps, as if some miracle might have happened in the meantime. I wait until he’s inside, until his shadow disappears from the kitchen door, before I grab the handle of the mower. Daisy tenses against just that tiniest movement. I tilt it back and drag it off her, the blade sliding and scraping out of her, and still she doesn’t make a sound, just raises her eyebrows as if in question. When I set the mower down beside her, her front paws scrabble in the dirt, trying to lift her, but she can’t get up.

  The tear, ripped open more by force than by the sharpness of the blades, goes almost all the way through her: her spine’s severed, her intestines are ruptured and spilling out, one leg’s cut clean through and the other’s barely attached to the hip by a few strings of bone about ready to snap. There’s little pieces of her all over the ground. She breathes shallow and fast, chest palpitating, ribs trembling like her lungs can’t quite open enough to lift them out of the way. Her huge, pink tongue lolls out of her mouth, pooling on the dirt.

  I pull my sweatshirt over my head and hold on to the mower with one hand. She looks away, far off into the woods like she’s tracking rabbits, while I lift up her back half and slide the shirt underneath. I wrap it around her, tight as I can, to help hold everything together. She whimpers just a little as I lift her up.

  “That’s a good girl,” I say.

  I hold her to my chest like a baby, her breastbone knocking against me with each panting breath, and she licks my neck while her blood soaks through the sweatshirt and onto my undershirt, a slick warmth that spreads down toward the hem. It gets heavier and heavier, sticks to my belly. Smells like metal and excrement.

  She breathes in and out, in and out, each one a thin, whistling wheeze that brushes my neck fainter than the last.


  “That’s a good girl,” I say. “That’s a real good girl.”

  She lays her head heavy on my shoulder. I pat it, run my finger and thumb along either side of the bony crest on its crown. I rub the inside of her ear. The skin’s waxy and cool, but the air inside it’s still warm. She leans nuzzling into my hand.

  “It’s all right. You’re okay.”

  I can’t tell the exact moment when it happens. You’d think I’d know, by now, the difference between the living and the dead.

  “That’s a good girl,” I say.

  I rub her ear a long time. When I pull my hand away, her head lolls against my shoulder. I kiss the corner of her mouth, where her soft bottom lip scoops lower than her jowls, and carry her back to the house. She gets heavier and heavier, until the bones in my arm strain to hold her up. Have to shift all her weight to one elbow to open the door, barely get it open without dropping her.

  In the kitchen, over the trash can, I peel the sweatshirt away. Her loose leg falls heavily down, pulls her so wide open a coil of intestine flops out and slaps the inside of the trash can. The sweatshirt’s stained a dark red, edged with yellowish-brown, crusted and stuck to her belly. It drapes down with one cuff brushing the garbage. I pick it from her fur and leave it heaped in the trash, drape her over the lip of the sink to drain, her front half pulled up to rest on the counter, paws extended like she’s trying to drag herself out of the basin, and walk to the bedroom.

  “She’s dead,” I say.

  Frank’s sitting propped up in the bed, against the headboard, real stiff and upright and pushed into the pillows, his eyes wide and the light skittering across them like he’s bearing witness to some cosmic unfolding on the other side of the window, the brightness and force of which drives him backwards into the cushions. He doesn’t look at me. He seems emptied, somehow, doesn’t even realize I’m here, right in front of him. Just keeps staring past me, muttering under his breath.

  I shake him by the shoulders. “She’s dead.”

  “You look like a maniac,” he says, grimacing at my shirtfront, soaked with blood and turning cold, the red stains splotching my forearm. “Just escaped from the penitentiary.” He smells like gasoline.

  “You killed her,” I say.

  “Killed who?”

  “Daisy. Your dog. Who loved you more than anything else in the entire world, for some reason that escapes me.”

  He squints, scouring pale memory. “That don’t sound like something I would do,” he says.

  “You drove over her with the lawnmower.”

  “I believe I’d remember doing a thing like that.”

  “It wasn’t fifteen minutes ago,” I shout. “There’s pieces of her scattered all over the dirt.”

  He chuckles. “Well, maybe I can finally get some grass to grow out there now that it’s got some good fertilizer in it.”

  “What in God’s name is wrong with you? You loved that dog.”

  “Which is precisely,” he says, one finger raised, like one of the detectives in his novels caught in the rapturous throes of unraveling the case’s solution, “why I wouldn’t have killed her.”

  I shake my head, speechless; I slog back to the kitchen and slide the cutting board beneath her body; I pull taut the leg that’s still attached, splinters of bone crackling, and with a meat cleaver pound the cut the rest of the way through her. A front-half mount’s all I’ll be able to save. Her hips and tail and hind legs, the skin hanging in useless shreds from the splintered bone, I set off to the side on a dishrag.

  Her eyes won’t close. Dogs’ eyes never do. Even when you pull their lids down with your own fingers, they slowly open again, but I try a long time, easing them down as far as they’ll go and holding them in place, until finally she at least looks like she’s fighting sleep. I turn the water hot as it’ll go and spray her down with the sprayer, squirt dish detergent on and lather her up, working the suds into her fur to break apart the slicks of blood and digestive matter. It takes a good five lathers, each one running paler pink and brown down the drain, to get her clean. I dry her with three separate bath towels and lay her on the counter, sit down at the kitchen table and rest my cheek against it, close my eyes for a couple minutes. I haven’t even started, and already I’m exhausted.

  My body’s heavy when I push it up from the table. My hands shake as they sweep my paring knife across the honing steel, a couple swipes each side, and press the blade into the thick, soft skin at the bottom of her belly. It slides right through. She splits open easy, bursts almost, light shuddering cold along the blade as it cuts clean up to her breastbone, subcutaneous fat welling into the cut in little yellow globules like fish eggs. The stink that bubbles up with them is worse than the smell of any wild animal I’ve ever cut open, thick and putrid like she’s rotted a week in the sun. I breathe through my mouth so I won’t smell it.

  The little bit of blood left in her surges into the cut, forms a lip along the edge of her skin, and falls away as I peel it back from either side of her belly, either side of her rib cage. It comes off easy, the knife running in long, smooth strokes across the seam where it joins the body, the fascia between them thin and pliable as the inaudible pause between syllables. That’s all that holds her together, and it’s barely more than nothing. Underneath it, her torso’s wrapped in a cocoon of white fat an inch thick. I get some cornmeal from the pantry, sprinkle it over her to soak up some of the juices. The bone and socket of her shoulder pry apart with a wet crack, the ligament tearing, and her forelegs fall loose, one, then the other, heavy inside the skin. I work it up her neck, over her face, her eyes two blurry dark spots beneath the membrane that binds their lids to her brow, like something trapped under ice, until the blade drags across the bone of the socket, its scrape shivering up my arm, and the membrane snaps away.

  What’s left of her, when the knife cuts through the cartilage of her nose and her skin falls into my arms, is a feral pink and white mass, the shredded convolutions of her intestines spilling out of her unfinished belly, her teeth endlessly bared and waiting to snap. Her eyes, without their lids, have none of their stoicism, none of their graveness or nobility. They leer out in wide-eyed shock at a world where every glint and movement is a terror. It’s the skin and the skin alone that makes any of us worthy of love or kindness. Underneath it we are monsters, every living thing.

  I fill a stockpot with water, shake in some baking soda, and set it to boil; I drive the bones of her forelegs from their thin, tight sheaths, snip through her toes at the last knuckle with my kitchen shears, scrape her ears back from the stiff blades of cartilage inside them, bits of flesh wedging under my thumbnails.

  The water breathes a whispered, rushing sound, though nothing stirs inside it. Clusters of tiny bubbles cling to the sides and bottom of the pot, against their own weightlessness. I saw through her neck with my bread knife, cut the tongue from between her teeth, her eyes from their sockets. The first tiny bubble detaches from the side of the pot and drifts upward. I lose it somewhere in the water, in the gash of light across its surface. With a grapefruit spoon I scrape the brain from the inside of her skull, as down the stringy walls of a pumpkin, to make sure I get every last bit.

  This is what it takes to hold on to something. To keep the things you’ve loved. The water flexes and warps; bubbles swell as they rise to its surface, driven upward by their own emptiness, and break open into the open air. I ease her skull into the pot.

  Steam billows hot and damp on my cheeks. It coats my glasses, feathers the hard lines of the counter and turns the sink and the pot cloudy and luminous, crowded round with fuzzy halos like the kind that coronate headlights passing across your windshield at night, and slowly fades away. A cold current ripples through me, starts all my arms and legs to shaking. Have to squeeze my eyes shut and hold on to either edge of the stove to keep myself upright. When it passes, I rummage up an old needle from the hutch in the hallway, use it to dig her flesh from my nail beds. Its point scratches white lines on the
undersides of my fingernails. Cornmeal’s crusted in spots across the backs of my hands like open, running sores. I scrape them away.

  I set all the pieces of her onto one towel, pinch the corners together so it makes a little knapsack, and carry it against my chest, heavy and soft, into the hallway. Frank’s still in the bed, asleep. I carry her outside, back to the dead patch, and lay her on the ground. The mower I drag to the shed, over the lip of the door, and back along the path he’s cleared, if the overturned empty paint cans and fallen rakes and the weedeater lying on its back are any indication, by just shoving the mower forward through everything in his way. I return it to its proper, bowed place on the plywood floor, drape the oil-stained towel over its handle, and pick through toolboxes and tackle boxes and loose piles of rusty wreckage until I find, in an old plastic coffee can full of doorknobs, two hook-and-eye latches and an old padlock, the rusty key still inside it, the metal around its body corroded in spots, dark rusty centers edged with light bluish-green. The latches I drop into my shirt pocket, a cold weight against my chest, and slip the nub of a pencil in after them; the padlock I hook in my belt loop. I take his drill, heavy in its plastic suitcase, from a hook on the corkboard wall, heft a shovel out of the old metal barrel he’s got them in, and set them outside, the floor bowing and bouncing so bad with each step it feels like I’m walking on a trampoline. The door’s been open so long, the frame’s warped without its reinforcement, so I have to heave with all my might to drag the door into it, flakes of rotten wood splintering away where their edges scrape each other. I wrestle the hasp closed, hook the padlock through it, shut it with a loud click, and tuck the key into my sock.

  I jam the shovel hard as I can into the dirt beside her, but it’s packed so cold, drawn shut by so many little roots, that the metal edge bounces right off, barely makes a dent. She’d want to be buried, I know she would. She’d like the ceiling of dirt like a coffee table always over her head, the feel of it compact around her like Frank’s legs on either side of her skull, squeezing it tight. I strike the earth over and over, the metal ringing cold and hollow and so hard it knocks my fingers off the wooden handle, and all I manage to do is scrape up a few little shavings. Can’t even lift my leg high enough to stomp down on the shovel. I throw it against the fence, pick Daisy up, and carry her back across the lawn, out the gate, and into the woods. The yard heaves itself a little wider with every crossing, as if it were driven outward by some internal impulse, by the endless need to escape itself.