by Andy Cox
She said, “If we loved Marly we should dig his grave with our hands.”
Mom hadn’t planted for years. The dirt under the tree was mostly old juniper needles that came out in curtains of velvety dust. I kept digging up filters that had Lanna’s toothmarks in them. All she would say was song lyrics in Spanish, really quiet and not to me. The pile got big behind us and the sunset came in orange. Sometimes she’d push my hands out of the way. The deeper we got the more cracked the earth was, until we were pulling chunks of dirt from the ground like rocks. Centipedes slipping backward into the cracks like copper cords and I wondered if they ate juniper berries. If they ate meat they would have Marly.
When I looked over he could have been some crumpled blankets, one color of black in the shadows. I felt sick for thinking that so I petted his side with my hand. He didn’t have tangles at all. I tried to count days since he’d been out of bed, and Marly’s mouth opened and closed. Lanna was digging one-handed, humming with her wrist pushed against her lips. She let juniper needles fall from her hand and glide into the hole. Mosquitoes dropped the same way through the air. It was deep enough for a grave, longer than wide. Marly’s mouth really did open and close.
He didn’t move when I touched him again. Then Lanna pulled him into the grave by one handle of his laundry hamper bed. He was slipped to one side in the bed of thin towels and she got down and put her face against his ribs, crying and saying the same words I didn’t know. I wish I never figured out why I didn’t say anything.
We buried Marly with a half pack of wieners we brought out from the fridge and all the biggest dirt chunks on top like a cairn of stones, and we built a star of broken branches over it and set it on fire with all our library books about Oz. I was always afraid Lanna would figure out I couldn’t keep her stories straight. Once she told me Corrupted were from Japan, but they chose to sing in Spanish because it was the language of magic. I said no way. I said the albums just came from a Japanese printing press.
A few days later our mom came back. She never mentioned Marly, but the next day she brought home pizzas and seven rental movies for a week. If I told Lanna and he didn’t move again, she would have called me a liar. That was why I didn’t say anything.
I found a Marly doorknob in Mom’s boxes while she was in the bath. It was wrapped in Christmas paper with my name on the tag, so old the tape was yellow and dry. I left the box and wrapping there and took it up to my room because it was black ceramic with a painted red tongue and red eyes. I don’t know how to change a doorknob so I just held it up against the inside of my door. It looked just like him and I remembered that exact box and paper from three Christmases ago. That time it had a Game Boy.
I hid it in the winter sheets in my closet and took it out a lot to draw pictures of Marly. To spend time I’d shade the backgrounds black until I couldn’t see the edges of his face. Lanna would push furniture around in her room, and then I’d hear hours of nothing but music so she was reading on her bed. I was thinking about Marly underground, frozen and stopped like the doorknob or a chess pawn or anything not alive. I tried to figure out what not being alive would mean, how if I was made of ceramic I would still want to move so people would know. I wished the doorknob would open and close its mouth at least once. If I was a chess pawn I would still try to tip myself over.
Lanna told me an eraser or a chess pawn doesn’t have muscles so it can’t move, not even to tip itself over. She said they didn’t have senses either and I hated that idea, how they were alone with themselves. “A dead dog has muscles,” I said. The skin shook under her eyes and she didn’t end up crying, but she yelled for me to get off the porch. She had a shrine built in the place of his sickbed, all these Polaroids and stale dog cookies mounted on a piece of posterboard. Except for the burning candles it looked like a science fair project.
When I asked Mom why I couldn’t have a lock on my door like Lanna she didn’t even spin her chair around to look at me. “She’s wearing down her records and it’s not even music, sweets.” Then she said it was hot enough in my room without locking it, she knew I was sad this summer and she didn’t want me to do anything crazy, I would grow into such a good person and I should just read a book on my bed or watch movies.
What I wanted was to look in a candle flame how Lanna said she always did, and I thought not getting disturbed had the most to do with it. I got a bag of tealights from the drugstore and instead of my room I locked the bathroom door so I could sit with my back to the tub and watch the burning candle on the tile. There was a bathmat off to one side made of fluffy black fibers and they started coming loose from each other and changing to white. By coming loose I don’t mean they actually moved, more like the littler shapes that made them up were coming into focus. I saw how the strands were all wrinkled or snapped or bent back on themselves or stretched thin. Like those trees that grow from the cracks between rocks all kinked over in the wind. The black wasn’t fading. I remember knowing that when I got up, but not what the difference meant. It was changing to white.
That was the only time I ever meditated. The candle burnt out and I stood up with numb legs. Everything seemed like it was swinging back and forth inside itself. I went down to the side garden with my shoes off and stood holding a cherry tree, watching Lanna sit with a cigarette in her fingers and trace glowing infinity loops in the air over the grave. The cairn dirt was still blackened from the ceremony fire.
I stayed back because I thought she might get mad, but I asked Lanna if she was okay with digging him up to say another goodbye. What I wanted was to see if he moved underground, even though that wouldn’t answer anything. I had words ready about wanting her to bless his spirit, but I didn’t have to say. She just put the cigarette in her teeth and started pushing dirt with two hands.
It felt like the same night as before. The little blurs of mosquito, the sunset like dusty fire. Lanna’s hands pushing mine away when I slowed down. With every piece of dirt we moved, more fell like sand through the cracked floor of his hole. Then I thought one more handful and we’d see part of Marly withered, his side or his leg.
“Don’t get scared,” I said. “I mean if he moved around a bit.” Lanna finally looked over. Her lips curled. Like she wanted me to know there was something wrong with me and she’d almost figured it out. She finally said, “Do you mean we buried Marly alive?” I edged off from her and the grave. “You were busy,” I said, sitting with my hands under me.
She yelled I was a shit and then I was pitiful and I was a waster, and she slapped me hard in the ear. It rocked my head sideways with this big clopping noise like a wood bell. I remembered Lanna saying she’d break my eardrum if I didn’t leave her bookshelf alone. A hot shiver of pain went through my ear and down my neck while I sat there watching her crush a chunk of dirt in her fist. Then I got up and ran.
The cracks in the flagstones felt sharp on my bare feet. I couldn’t run straight and all I heard through that ear was a hiss like a tire going empty. I turned my head twice to see if Lanna was chasing me. The second time I saw she was crying too, and I cut around the corner of the house.
Down both sides of the front driveway were long folding card tables stacked up with junk. I ran between them, hardly looking. Mom used to talk every few days about having a yard sale and I didn’t remember you never have those at night. I was ready to start running down the street but Lanna stopped in the driveway and then walked into the garage. After a long time I came back. There was supposed to be a yellow bare bulb over the garage door but instead their sign was glowing there flat and red, coming blood pink through the bodies of the moths who held there like trembling pieces of scab. That was the first time I saw the real Salvation Army.
I remembered our garage so full you could barely squeeze through sideways, but this time Mom’s boxes and plastic tubs were gone from the walls. The room went on longer than our whole house, stretching like a road tunnel through a hillside, two lines of dull socket lamps in the ceiling. Hot thick shocks were washin
g through my ear, down the side of my head. While I stared the crickets started to sing, and the breeze smelled like cellar floors and rotting tin. Both sides of the long room were lined with folding tables and newspaper racks full of clutter and I just stared with my broken ear hissing until the middle table came down to meet me from the far end of the hall. Lanna came with it, but frozen in position like she was drinking from a little gray sack. I couldn’t think. Then she was standing looking at the table, and so was I.
All the different parts of Marly were mixed up across the wide folding table. They looked like they’d spent years in the ground and it never once rained. Everything had dirty little price stickers I couldn’t read. His skull all brittle, filmed with dust, and these things like fingers cut from gray gloves were sections of his tail. Splintered bones in rough stacks and dried tissue like rusty streaks of cobweb. Bundles of yarn laid out by color but all just faded blacks. I reached to take one but I pulled back. If I took one, I might have seen how it works.
The people behind the table looked cut from heavy construction paper. Shapes like green photocopies of old coats, old coats wearing themselves and each one with a red Salvation Army shield pinned off-center to the neck or the featureless head. They spoke in a grainy, stretched version of my voice and I thought it was the one from our answering machine tape.
“The children who live in the yellow house with their mother who left their toy dog in the ground who asked to have it again.”
They didn’t say anything else. When I looked back down Marly’s parts were different. Fresh and gleaming wet, laced together in some way I couldn’t understand. The smell made spit rise up my throat and the green shapes of people behind the table didn’t move when I turned my head. Like how when a bright light stains the back of your eye, you can’t look away from the stain. The real Salvation Army people were the same way.
“Marly wasn’t a toy,” I said. “He was alive.”
The pulling green voice said, “What you call the world is a working of joints and every joint of everything in your world is alive and no joint moves at all. If you could stand outside a life, you’d realize that. Just as the bundle of hair can’t pull and push itself across the table, the child can’t replace the events of its life into a different order. But do you not both appear to move, and both in just the same way?”
The voice had something behind it, like different words forming in a second throat. The pieces of Marly changed every time I looked down and the table was warped and peeling, the laminated top cracking apart. Lanna was chewing a piece of gray yarn from her hair and she said something back. I don’t know what she could have told them, but it was what she told Marly before she pushed dirt over him, and before that I heard it through her wall. But I only know one word in Spanish.
Then she leaned in and pushed all the parts of Marly together on the table. Bone and skin, slick gray flesh and fading yarn. He was always so small. “Cuánto?” she said, and pointed at the pile. Then she shrugged and took a handful of change from her jacket pocket and set it down on the table. I remember this black bobby pin being in with the coins. Lanna lifted something from underneath Marly’s pelvis bone. The heart of canine leukemia was smaller than I thought, like old gray paper stretched over a brittle cage the size of a plum. The top was dented, almost torn open. I must not have missed after all.
What I think now is you don’t actually need to pay. But Lanna grabbed my shoulder and I couldn’t move. She looked at me a long time before she stepped back and she peeled a piece of skin from the thin coarse heart. Leeches were moving inside it, churning slow and wet, one dull hook of tooth at the point of each thin head. She tipped the heart to her lips and drank the leeches down, and it moved into her throat like a breath.
After that I just remember the long brown table with the peeling top. Marly’s parts were gone but somehow the clutter stayed. Whenever my eyes found an in-between space, something would rush in to fill it. I don’t know. Things I still can’t tell from my other memories. Bead jars and crumpled pages from under Lanna’s bed. A safety pin on a broken chain. A plate of burnt-out incense cones, a cork. The table kept rising closer and I couldn’t look away. Her old blue plastic camera, and that same camera with the side smashed in. All these trays of clear liquid in little hospital jars. Then the first string of her yarn, the first red root of tooth. Wherever I turned, I couldn’t look away.
But I was standing over the grave alone with chunks of earth shifting in the ground. When I put my hand between them I felt Marly’s ribs moving, and he sneezed. That was it. I clapped my hands twice for come, and his head pushed up from the loose dirt. I helped him out and he sneezed again and shook, dust smoking orange all around him in the sunset. His hair was hair like any dog’s, not yarn. Most people would call it a mean game to bury a dog. But it seemed to me like he knew how to play.
I left the hamper in the garden dirt. Marly left dirty pawprints in the laundry room when he came in with me. Mom was in her chair drinking a bottle of rose wine and I asked if she’d seen Lanna and she just breathed out and threw her glass. She still didn’t look at me. She started saying I wasn’t funny but I was already running upstairs.
I’d never seen Lanna’s bed made before, or her books squared away. The two Corrupted albums were balanced on the windowsill with the sun on them. I took one from the sleeve and it was so melted from the heat the grooves weren’t even there. I sat on her bed for a long time. Marly jumped up and stood on my lap to do shake-a-paw, and I held it for a long time before I knew what was different. That night I looked in a book and made sure. They put his feet together with the pads underneath facing backward, the wide ones in front.
I dreamed I went to see her in the garden, but in real life I never figured out where she was buried. Later I started dreaming she came there to see me. One time Mom asked why we weren’t in school and Lanna said July wasn’t even over. She didn’t believe us, she needed to see a TV channel to prove it. But half way through September she asked again, and that time I was alone. I said I didn’t want to go and she just bit the side of her hand.
I got three months off. My first day back, a science teacher said we were made of almost entirely oxygen, carbon and hydrogen atoms. All that mattered was the pieces coming together the right way. I started breathing so hard all I could do was grab the sides of my desk. After a while somebody touched me and I screamed. I got more time off, and a school transfer if I wanted, but then Marly got sick again. I took money from one of the hatboxes in Mom’s closet. We met a lady on the Greyhound bus, I paid her a hundred dollars to say she’s my mom, and we found a shelter in the city where we could stay.
Marly’s okay. He has a hard time waking up once a month or so, but there’s a vet who puts blood in him from other dogs. I just go up to the desk with a card they gave me, I write our names on some forms. I don’t know whose dogs, or who pays the vet. It’s probably the Salvation Army too.
I’ve been thinking about the people who look like green construction paper. I think just by living, people like us do something wrong to time. Like we put things out of order by remembering them. We just can’t stop living. We can’t even stop living by dying, because we can’t take our old selves out of time. We stay like an old spill polluting the ground, living over and over again. I think there’s another kind of people who don’t have to live, and we need them to go through all the parts of time we leave behind, connecting them back up so our world can keep going. When I get mad at how they’re not even good at it, I remind myself they don’t know us at all, and I don’t see how they could be doing it for a reward. Whatever we could try to pay, it all goes right back on the table.
I don’t know, I hope maybe there’s something else. I’ve been looking every day in the record bins. When Marly gets better I’m going to try and volunteer.
“I guess it didn’t work.” She stood up from the plush brown chair and pulled her jacket around her. “I’m still here.”
The woman in the sweater leaned for
ward a little, sitting her hands on her knees. “No one could ever blame a little girl for someone getting leukemia, Lanna. You don’t need to put yourself in anyone else’s place.”
“I told you, I’m not using you as a therapist. If I could find them one more time I wouldn’t need you at all.” She walked to the doorway and stood with one hand holding the frame. The plush dog on her shoulder lolled its red flannel tongue. “You said I could pay you to listen for two hours a week, no matter what. I feel so bad I did that to Jamie. Next week I’ll come back with different pieces.”
***
For my brother. Not Josh. The other one.
***
Noah Wareness lives in Toronto with six friends, two dogs, and a mangled photocopier. He performs using exclusively ‘WEER’ narrative frames, ‘MARLYS’ pathos and ‘SHRANDER’ images.
TTA NOVELLAS
SPIN by NINA ALLAN
2014 BSFA Award winner
“Nina Allan’s reimagining of the Arachne myth, with its receding overlays of the modern and the antique, creates a space all its own. The scene is clean and minimal, the light Mediterranean, the story seems musing and sad but Spin has you in a grip that persists long after you put it down” M. John Harrison