If You Find a Mouse on a Glue Trap
If you find a mouse on a glue trap, he’ll eyeball you with one black shiny eye while breathing in and out faster than you have ever seen anything breathe. You will panic, though you know the mouse is panicking harder. When your husband points out that the mouse is not alone in the furnace...
What Bad Owners Say at the Dog Park
1. He’s friendly. 2. He never does that. 3. That’s his way of playing. 4. He’s still learning. 5. Pookie, come here. 6. He’s not so good on recall. 7. Pookie’s still learning how to listen, isn’t he? 8. Watch out for his leash! 9. Pookie, come! Come, Pookie! Are you listening? If you don’t...
Dog’s Search for Meaning
I grab the walker and pull myself out of bed. I rub the six-inch surgery scar on my back and test my feet on the hardwood floors. They work today. The room is too quiet. The dog bed is empty. I walk to the living room and scan the back yard for Sheldon. He is...
The End of a Story
Lately, there has been a barred owl in the park across the street. Walking the dog after work, we noticed him on the ground. When he saw the dog, he spread his wings, mottled brown and white, and swooped up into a tree. He perched himself on a branch, looking down at us as we...
Dusk, I-270
It was dusk and I’d just crossed over into Missouri when he hurdled in front of my truck, a buck, an eight-pointer. I slammed the brakes and he seemed to freeze–not in the headlights, but in my windshield, his big rheumy eyes staring vacantly into mine. Like two drunks on the dance floor we collided,...
The Shriek They Knew So Well
When Chico, my parents’ beloved pearl cockatiel, flew away, Father drove circles around the lake—windows rolled down in ninety degree heat—calling the bird’s name in a thick, coconutty Indian accent while Mother paced the sidewalks carrying Chico’s three-story white iron cage hoisted high above her head, doors blown wide open in hopes that Chico would...
Tlacolula
On a flat rooftop in Tlacolula, Mexico, a shepherd dog moves as the shade moves throughout the afternoon and, by this, keeps its own counsel. At other times, the shepherd patrols the perimeter of its world. On market days, for instance, it’s excited by goats herded down the main avenue, and by the man hawking...
Bulldog
The one time I saw the dog—I was eleven and had just met Mark—she had nearly hanged herself, in her maniacal aggression, from a stout oak tree. Mark and I stood outside of the chain-link fence, in his father’s narrow side-yard, watching. The grass was winter-brown; it crunched under our shoes. A jet from the...
Two Kinds of Light
At the northwestern edge of the United States, a left arm of the ocean thrusts into the continent up to its shoulder as if fishing for a lost wedding ring with its fingers. My home is at the inside bend of its elbow. Offshore, pods of orca whales hunt for seals and salmon, crabs crawl...
Swimming with the Bull
It was midday when we topped the last rise on the trail with our noses aimed at the blue coolness of Moose Lake. Rane and I looked out over the small body of water and spotted the racks of a bull moose ten yards out from the near shore. “Is he eating?” Rane whispered, nudging...
Postcard from the Phoenix Zoo
Ruby, the elephant, must have spent much of her time studying that cluster of boulders — a formation the color of pottery before it is fired, a formation known to us as the Papagos — beyond the bars of reinforced steel that surround her. The abundance of red on her canvas testifies to this. Often...
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