No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  “What’s wrong?” she says to the husband, before he is fully awake. Her voice sounds like curtains and it surprises her. She talks again to hear it. “What’s wrong.”

  He reaches for his ear. “Something bit me,” he says thickly. He feels around his ear, brings back dark on his fingertips. “Oh my god. What the hell?”

  She sinks back into her pillow. “Willie was up here,” she tells him. “I imagine he scratched you.” And she does imagine Willie scratching him, stepping into his ear accidentally on his way across the bed. But she knows how big a lie it is; Willie doesn’t come into the bedroom anymore.

  SHE FILLS THE LION AGAIN THE NEXT NIGHT, AND THE NEXT after. It becomes her only purposeful routine and she enjoys it, taking the breath of her husband in distress. Often she does not wake him at all, only worries him out of deep sleep and into trouble. She presses her nails against his eyelids while he dreams. She pulls at the short hairs on the back of his neck. She pulls the loose skin of his limp, circumcised penis up around the head, enveloping it, and maybe she will give a twist to the gathered opening of the new little sack she’s made there. The lion laughs into the husband’s mouth, the melt from his eyes dripping onto the bed as he takes in the troubled air stumbling from the man.

  The lion grows large over days, days that are the gathering rumor of weeks passing, maybe months. She sets him to lie in the doorway to her daughter’s room, and the husband walks by but does not try to come in. Sometimes the husband stands in the door when she is in the room alone, ignoring the lion at his feet.

  Other times, she catches the husband looking at the lion. He looks at him closely, dubiously, as though he were seeing an oddly colored patch of carpet that might be a stain. They do not like the way the husband looks at him. She keeps the ice in the lion’s eyes, and he is nearly as large, maybe, as a lion should be, but he has no teeth, and his clawless great paws only puddle where he steps.

  THE HUSBAND CALLS. HE ASKS WHAT SHE NEEDS AT THE store. She is lying on the couch, the long dwindling length of her belly pressed against the lion’s back.

  “Milk,” she says into the phone, though she doesn’t know that for sure. She wonders where he is standing now, if he is already at the store or even standing at all. If he is driving and where. She thinks for a moment she will ask, but instead she tells him, “Grenadine. Peppercorn. Marshmallows, the little colored ones, okay? And string cheese, get lots of string cheese.”

  Quiet comes through the phone. She waits. She smooths the lion’s ears. “Hello?” she says.

  “The smoky kind,” her husband says suddenly, and a slab of sound jumps through the phone with him, wind washing over the talkpad, and a blurb of traffic. She hears a faint sound like a metronome.

  “No,” she says.

  ON A WEDNESDAY, SHE MAKES TEETH FOR THE LION FROM chicken bones. He has asked for them. She cuts the bones down and sharpens them, notches them so she can string them into his mouth. While they dry, he lurks around the kitchen impatiently, his feet padding across the tile like a child’s. She watches him walk, watches the perpetual melt from his eyes staining his face.

  “Come outside while we wait,” she tells him, and when they go outside into the sun, the lion crouches in the shade of the garage. It worries her that he does this. She pulls out her scissors, calls him to her side. While he sits scowling in the sun, she fills his paws with driveway rocks.

  A NIGHT COMES WHEN THE HUSBAND RENTS A MOVIE, AND SHE lets him refuse to excuse her from it. In the movie there are serious people, screen-filling faces, the close carnal sounds of talking.

  The lion sleeps on the floor by the gas fireplace and she watches him. He is piled there like a fallen thing. His tail does not move. She is surprised to find herself thinking, with some dismay, that his stillness would fail to draw flies in the sun. His ears are like pockets pulled out.

  Something happens in the movie. There is sound for it, music maybe or rising speech; she isn’t sure. She doesn’t look and doesn’t think to wonder more until after the husband makes a noise. He makes a noise that she thinks is like the sound of good food going down, but then he reaches for the remote, and the movie sounds drop away. She looks up at the TV. The screen is blank with that blue, that blue. She looks over at the husband and he stares at her, his hands around his head.

  “What is it?” she says.

  “I think we’ll stop there, yeah?”

  “Why? What is it?”

  He breathes. “You missed it.”

  “What?” she says, but he doesn’t answer. He sinks back into his seat, and she can tell from his flatly pursed face that she has missed something, something that he has given size to; she can’t imagine what. She isn’t sure she would even try. She watches the husband and grows slowly heavy thinking how it is a novelty to consider him at all, to imagine a wave that has washed over him and not just by. She spends what feels like minutes trying to discern whether what she has missed was something he wanted her to see, or something he didn’t. When she finally talks, it is before she is ready, and it is more than she wants to say. She says, “I’m sorry, I was thinking.”

  The husband lifts his chin, stretches out his jaw without opening his mouth. He puts his hands back around his head. She hears a soft thupping, and she looks over at the lion. His eyes are still closed while his tail curls and slaps across the carpet.

  SHE CANNOT GET INTO THE GARAGE FROM THE HOUSE. THERE are three stairs down.

  The husband has a white dresser in the garage. She knows that the top of it is pockmarked, and marred by dried pools of paint that have congealed along the outlines of absent obstacles—the straightedge of a board or the machined crescent of a can. Hanging from a shelf overhead, he has babyfood jars filled with washers and nails. The jars are screwed into their lids, and the lids are nailed to the underside of the shelf. They hang there, she thinks, like hives. Like stalled drops of water. There are more lids than jars now.

  The lion lies on an angle of green carpet at the bottom of the garage steps while the husband works with glue. She can’t see her husband, but she can just see the lion’s tail flutter across the carpet below, and she can smell the glue rising up through the open door into the laundry room where she sits. She can see her husband’s shadows. The carpet beneath the lion is what’s left of what used to be, long ago, the good carpet. Beneath it, she knows, there is a rough and chipped patch on the concrete where her daughter once brought rocks in from outside and crushed them with a hammer. She pounded them into dust. Hoped to find them shinier on the inside. She had to stop because a fragment flew up and into her eye, left an oozy imprint of itself there, fell out again. She had to stop then because she had to be taken to the hospital so she could have a tiny gray seam sewn into the snowy stuff of her eye while she slept.

  She hears her husband’s voice. She thinks by what he says that he is trying to fix something that’s been broken before. She waits for him to fail.

  “That should get it,” he says. She hears the iron rustle of tools going away.

  “Don’t you think?” he says. He says, “Yep, yep.”

  She sees his shadows open like scissors on the floor. The lion’s tail flickers as they move across him. “If that doesn’t fix it, it’s beyond me,” the husband says, and his voice grows, she knows, because he has turned away from the white dresser. His shadows scissor together. He comes up the steps and she does not bother to turn away from the door. He almost walks into her.

  “What are you doing here?” he says.

  “I came to see what you were working on.”

  “Nothing, really. You must be hungry.”

  “I’m not,” she says, but she is.

  THAT NIGHT SHE WAKES UP TO A SOUND LIKE A SHOVEL GOING into gravel. She hears the scrape of it in the garage, again and again. She lifts herself out of bed, makes her way through night-light pools down the hall through the kitchen to the laundry room. The door to the garage is open, and she wheels herself to the threshold, leans into her lap and looks aro
und the door frame, down the stairs.

  The scrap of green carpet has been pulled aside. The floor beneath it shines. The lion crouches there with his long back to her, and she sees by the way he moves his head that the noise that has brought her down is the sound of his tongue across the concrete. This tongue must be made of metal, she thinks, and she wonders how it could be. The lion licks the spot beneath the carpet where the jagged rough pits in the concrete still are, and she is certain that they go smooth, like small soft wounds under freshly picked scabs. She sits back in her chair. She listens.

  IN ANOTHER NIGHT, IN HER DAUGHTER’S BEDROOM, JUSTIN Morgan’s horse stands on the shelf again, very close to exactly back inside its old hoofprints in the dust. His ear is beside him, sheltering its own new impression there. She has made it this way, weeks ago, and her husband has let it be.

  She stops in the doorway, sensing that the dry smell of quiet is dampened by a busy dank weight, a thickness that constricts the room. She turns on the light, and the lion is on the bed. His tail twitches and lashes across the sheets, and his sharp new teeth are strung into his mouth with thick black cord. His heavy paws dimple the sheets. The ice is back in his eyes, and he does not blink in the sudden light. She hooks her thumbs around the push rims of her chair, drawing back into the seat.

  “Here,” she says to him, and she pats her lap. She clears her throat. “Here.” He gazes at her, a low rustle feathering in the buckle of his jaw. He slaps his tail against the sheets before rising up on all fours, and she almost draws a breath at his looming girth, how he has to look down at her to meet her eyes. He drops heavily to the floor, his paws piling onto the carpet. He comes to her and acts as though he will try to wind between her legs, but he is far too large. Instead he rubs his wet face against the back of her hand. He pushes his face against her so that his lip draws up, and she feels the cold bones of his teeth slide across her skin.

  SHE STOPS FEEDING THE LION HER HUSBAND’S BREATH. THE lion does not complain, but he takes to sleeping on the bed between them, and his bulk is thick against her at night. He smells rank, the stench of the chicken bones spilling from his mouth. His ragged seams are swollen like scars, twisted and lividly worn. She begins to dream that he steals her breath while she sleeps, has dreams that a great weight—greater than her belief in her own power to inhale—presses down on her chest, and that the air is stale and close around her mouth. Sometimes she wakes and the lion is always gone, and she almost believes that she can hear him slipping around the bed, that the pinwheel is whickering happily in his throat.

  A day comes when she believes she does not see Willie anymore.

  “THERE’S A BAD SMELL IN THE HOUSE,” HER HUSBAND SAYS to her. The lion is stretched out beneath the coffee table.

  “I don’t smell it.”

  “It’s terrible.” He wrenches up his nose. He becomes an uglier man.

  “I don’t smell it. I’m here all day.”

  “Where’s Willie?”

  “He’s around.”

  “I haven’t seen him.”

  “He’s around.”

  “Well, did he bring something dead home?”

  She doesn’t answer, and a silence the shape of everything swells into the room.

  THE LION STOPS FOLLOWING HER AROUND. SHE BEGINS TO come across him unexpectedly throughout her days and into nights. She finds him curled in the bathtub behind the curtain, pressed ludicrously against the ceiling atop the cabinets in the kitchen, cooling himself in the shade of the garage. She finds him mostly in her daughter’s room, never on the bed. She imagines that she hears him jumping down as she approaches, but when she arrives he is alert and cool on the floor. Early one morning she returns from the bathroom and discovers him curving like a blade across the head of the bed while her husband still sleeps. The husband does not snore, exactly, but his mouth hangs open, his thin lips drying, and the suck of his breath sounds like such delicate, ancient work. His folded hand lies against his chin.

  “What are you doing?” she says to the lion.

  “Gathering,” the lion growls.

  She skirts around the bed. She leans against her husband and shakes him awake.

  “Paul?” she says. “Paul?”

  “What?”

  “Paul.”

  “What is it? What’s happening?” She imagines she sees the lion blink.

  “Take me to the store,” she says.

  “What? Now?” He sits up in the bed. The lion’s tail twitches.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you need at the store?”

  “I need to go.”

  “I’ll go,” he says, and he is already rising. He is stepping into pants. “You stay here. What are you wanting?”

  “No,” she says, “no.” Her moving face pulls at tight strings in her throat. He zips his pants, sits back on the bed.

  “What do you need, Al?”

  “No, I could go. We could go, you could take me. I don’t know, I know, it’s hard.” She lifts both of her hands into, onto the thick air, swallows and feels a tug down her arms to her thumbs, and she curls her palms around some heat or cold rising or sinking over the bed between them. Her fingers curl and her thumbs rise. “Why is it like that?” she says, and there is a moment when she says it, a simple clear moment like dreamed falling, when she is sure she means only why her lifted thumbs burn.

  Paul puts a hand on her knee, a hand into his hair. “Baby, hey, it’s okay. Let me go. Okay? I want to go for you,” he says to her. He emphasizes for. “What do you need me to bring you?”

  She feels her face go flat, like her insides have left it. Her hands fall. Her throat turns to milk. She makes him some names of things she forgets, follows him into the front room, and he bends at the waist to kiss her on the head before he leaves.

  When he has gone, she returns to the bedroom. The lion is still there on the bed. She slides from her chair to lie down beside him and he lets his head fall across her shoulder, puts a paw against her ribs.

  “Your paw is heavy,” she says. She puts her small hand atop it.

  He snickers a purr through his throat, flexes his paw. She hears and feels the stones inside grinding, imagines they grate against her ribs, rattling her heart. His hot breaths are in her ear.

  “What is that smell?” she says, almost to herself. The bed heaves as he stretches, and she hears the paper fan in his throat crackle as he yawns. His ruined breath makes her eyes water, makes her gut contract. She hears the mysterious wet lurch of his tongue like a thick shining gritty liquid, hears the hollow shiver of his teeth coming back together. She listens for the door, as if such sounds were discernible. The lion lays his throat across her, pushing her into the pillow, such a hot crushing pleasure, trembling and close.

  The Whale Dream

  ONCE YOU LIVED WITH A DREAMER. AFTERWARD, ON THE first day you speak since November, she tells you she has dreamed about a whale. She says it is a dream to beat them all, a visitation. She says this as though it were morning over a shared bed. You don’t know what to say. You don’t say much. You don’t question her about the dream. She tells you she has put the dream into words, asks if she can send the dream-in-words to you. She has dreamed you were both in the belly of the whale, she says.

  You think you will allow her to send you the dream. You think you will warn her that you will steal it from her, though, take from her the lovely wet fabric of whatever it is she has dreamed, turn it into this very story or something like it. You think the truth is owed, think you can never repay the debt of your ongoing theft. You believe you can hear—even now—the noises made in the busy darks of a body at rest.

  Airbag

  Two

  DORLENE FINDS ME ON THE PORCH. THE STORM DOOR CREAKS and starts to come open of its own accord, the top window empty. When it’s half-open, Dorlene steps out from behind the bottom panel, looking right at me. The sun’s just under, but there’s still a lot of light—strawberry-yogurt-colored up in the sky but kind of a rosy yellow dow
n on the lawn. I’ve been watching it all. Someone’s fired up the grill—I can smell it—and maybe the smoke has rubbed off on me; I’m two cigarettes deeper into my pack. Meanwhile I’ve hardly eaten a thing.

  Dorlene makes a beeline for me. I’ve still got the swing rocking soft, but as she comes close I bring it to a stop. The plate’s in my lap, and she comes around the front of me and—figure this—steps right up between my legs to gander at the food. She actually hooks one arm over the top of my leg, and as she does it a thrill pulses up into my crotch, my gut. I hold as still as a deer, feeling her underarm and her ribs pressed against my thigh.

  Dorlene looks the plate over, humming. She takes the biggest red chip, holding it in both hands. She turns to face the yard, still between my legs, and starts in on one side of the chip like it’s a burger or something. Or maybe more like it’s a leaf of lettuce and she’s some spry herbivore, having a watchful snack at dusk. It’s that rodenty look she has. I don’t move.

  Dorlene chews the chip, her little bites rhythmic. Once it’s gone she asks me for a cigarette—she mimes it, actually, not a word between us yet—and after she worries her extra tobacco out into a neat pile on the porch and snaps off the filter, we both light one up. Down on the lawn, a girl screams happily. If anyone came into the front hall right now they could see this, me and Dorlene out here on the porch, her between my legs real easy, us both lit up and quiet. But I mostly don’t care, and I feel alone here with Dorlene, and we watch the colors go out over the striped fields.

  “You seemed like you didn’t want to talk,” Dorlene says at last. I’ve no idea if it’s even true, but I tell her I guess I didn’t. We smoke a while more.

  “I met your Tweedy,” Dorlene says then. And okay, she’s got that voice, but it doesn’t sound like she’s even trying to say Triti’s name right. Plus: the way she’s phrasing it.

  “My Triti?” My own voice creaks.

  “Oh, you know.” She spreads her arms out over the tops of my legs, gesturing out across the farmyard, out over everything in sight, spreading her arms so straight and so far that her elbows almost go backward. Little blue veins, thin as threads, are painted under her skin there. She turns full circle, letting her gesture encompass everything but herself. “All you all. This whole place.” What she’s heard or what she’s divined about Triti, I don’t know, but when Dorlene says this to me my throat doubles over on itself and water shimmies up around my vision. “She’s sharp,” Dorlene goes on, still looking out over the lawn. “Kind of a force—I see what you saw in her. And Mr. Shamblin says she’s talented.” I nod, my throat still forging a grotesque gravity in my neck. “She’s how old? Twenty-four?”