“Wow,” Marie said. “What do you think happened?”
I looked up and saw a huge pile of discarded clothes and boxes and furniture. Like a whole apartment had pulled over to the side of the road after a night of drinking and vomited.
“Whoa, dog,” I called, as he started pulling me down the sidewalk, soon as we were out the front door. “Heel!”
“I haven’t taught him that yet,” Marie said. “I mostly just let him pull.”
We’d talked about getting a dog since moving into the apartment together, then I moved out for a few months and when I moved back, she had the puppy. I refused to call him anything but dog.
“Wow,” Marie said. “What do you think happened?”
I looked up and saw a huge pile of discarded clothes and boxes and furniture. Like a whole apartment had pulled over to the side of the road after a night of drinking and vomited.
“Somebody get thrown out?” I said. I let go the leash and the dog ran around, sniffing from one artifact to the next.
Marie picked up a photo album, started flipping through. “Wow. Look at these guys. They look like everyone I went to high school with.”
I walked over, looked at the pictures of a group of friends mugging for the camera. They were drinking from forties and a keg, giving the finger and devil horns. I started picking up clothes, holding them in front of me. I opened a drawer and found rows of videotapes.
The dog barked and I looked up, saw other people approaching as if they’d been waiting for someone else to come by and dig in first.
“It’s OK, dog,” I said. “It’s OK.” I walked over and grabbed his leash, pulled him back with me to continue looking through the videos. Most looked bought used from Blockbuster or the library, some had handwritten labels. Marie was still looking through the photo album, laughing and looking at each closely like she might find herself there in the background of one.
The last two videos in the back were unmarked and I thought they were probably blank but also couldn’t help but wonder if they might be something else. I tucked them in my coat then went and grabbed the dog’s leash, started pulling him to the street.
“C’mon,” I called. “Let’s get before everyone else gets here.” Marie walked over, still holding the photo album and bent down, petted the dog.
On the walk back, I kept thinking what they might be, the videos I’d grabbed. I imagined us getting home and watching them together, locking the dog out of the bedroom and role-playing, making believe we were the two in the movie, watching ourselves. Like she’d kicked me out and threw all my shit out in the street, yelled out the window at me as I drove away maybe, but now I’d come back and we were making up. Like the dog barking outside the bedroom door had been ours for years and he’d been harder to leave than any of my other shit, all that shit piled up down at the end of the block that now I didn’t even care who might be going through and what they might be taking.
Aaron Burch has stories forthcoming, all pretty soon, in New York Tyrant, Barrelhouse, PANK, and Quick Fiction. Other recent stories are online and pretty Googleable. His chapbook, How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew, should be out in January from PANK and a longer collection, How to Predict the Weather, is forthcoming from Keyhole Books. He edits HOBART.
