Ode: Feeling Up My Friend’s Sister at the Moment Their Drunken Father Begins the Dog Slaughter
It’s like instant punishment for the nipple she shows me, the pinkish tender at my fingertips before her father pumps the first shells into the chamber, before the original buckshot blast, the initial yelp, the first half-dead dog twitching in the grass.
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The wire-haired terrier is the last, little blur of salt and pepper, the smallest target, though I suspect she must have once been the family favorite, the not-yet-picked-off, so fast, so sweet that their father, in a kinder moment, named her after his favorite rolling paper: Zig Zag.
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O heart above his biker’s belly, steady pumper, what whiskey, what blow, what fuel in her father who I imagine, by now, shooting himself in the mouth, his head flying apart, then re-assembling for a homicidal eternity in some dogless ring of hell.
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She takes her shirt at the waist and pulls it up slowly: first her hips, then her belly. Then her bra—yellow button-sized flowers on the white shoulder straps. And when she places my hand on her breast, my fingertips run rough and nicked
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across the smooth fabric. I can’t speak. I can hardly breathe. I consider myself lucky, a knock-kneed idiot in a crooked barn gone to heaven: her shoulders, her hair, and then, uncupped, her untanned breasts in the dust-funneled air.
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Their dogs are healthy, their dogs are kind, do not bite. Their dogs heel cattle, run off from time to time, but not after log trucks, and never too far. Their dogs are puppies. Their dogs are old. Their dogs are all shoveled into a single hole.
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Minus Zig Zag: down from the hayloft, then off with her brother on his Honda 70 to the front yard where Zig Zag is running in a tightening circle while their father reloads, and we speed out, and I swoop Zig Zag up, yes, into my arms.
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Who would guess that the father would take another shot despite the fact of me and his son between the barrel and the dog? We hear buckshot whiz by, and do not, thank God, bog down in mud between the edge of their yard and the highway.
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To say that this was punishment would force reason. I touched her breasts, felt her nipples. Then the first shot. I don’t know what it’s about, which is what I tell my neighbor decades later after she walks out from putting her son to bed,
sweet boy who was pulled from her womb past the cord around his neck, beautiful boy who has only learned slowly, carefully, how to speak with damaged muscles, who says to her in the moment before sleep: “Mom, I’m afraid. What if I can never sing?”