Dog and Luggage Scott T. Hutchison
Pack mates emerge from the bowels of their home carrying the big foreign-smell containers; they brush past her as if she is invisible, caught up in their flurries of stuffing small spaces and nooks with inconsequential pieces of their lives before abandoning the den. She no longer attempts to share the pack’s excitement at such moments, knows what this laughter and bark mean for her, the least member: the quick leash, the careening car ride to the land of chain link fence and concrete ground, where she will find herself surrounded by the disconsolate howls and whines of the deserted, dejected. Touches will be offered there— by unfamiliar hands, a few kind-sounding words during attempts to play catch with a foreign-slobbered ball, garbled voices containing no menace, but no respect, no love. Everything feels far away. The pack will leave her in a place where there is no rug, where the food does not taste the same. A chemical scent she cannot lick or shed away grinds into her coat when she lies down in the hard corners. She knows that when the containers roll she can no fully longer trust playful opportunities to heel beneath the same sun. The pack always returns from their roam, welcomes her to take her place. But something unfamiliar lingers each time. The ominous dreams never leave—the ones that make her kick and cry herself awake in the night, visions they believe are nothing more than chasing a family of rabbits across the distant fields.
The Wayne Literary Review: Escapism
86
