noam-hessler

He beats his dog. Yells at it, fat bloodhound. When he comes home to the house empty of his Navy daughter and his lackadaisical artist son from the fishmarket that he runs with military efficiency it is cold and the lights are off and the bloodhound trembles. The hound tried to meet his eyes once, he lashed it, left it in the yard and screamed at it as it barreled back into the house and up the stairs to Navy daughter’s. Knocked down three chairs in its rush and sat on her fucking bed. The hound pees on the floor and so he beats it. It barks at the mailwoman who arrives with sogged packages and so he beats it. That is his job, to bark at her as she accelerates out of his driveway. When no cars are in the driveway and the hound twitches or drools sleeping he bays. He does not drink and he sits with a glass of cool water he has bubbled in the sodastream in the kitchen and he bays low and slow as the stew he makes with chuck from the farmers’ market, until he chokes, the dog does not enter. He smokes in the house and the hound tries to untangle why it loves the smell but hates him so. There is a patch on its ear, perfect and round, from where he branded it with a swisher from the 7/11 by the market where he goes when he is too tired to beat. That evening he is sitting in his car outside there, windows down, cig in his mouth unlit and wringing his left hand with his right as he’d like to do to someone’s neck until he is soothed and can be home in the empty house with the hound his artist son bought.

It is dark and it rushed him that darkness when he opened the door and now he stumbles back nearly tripping over his shoes and his own legs, his legs escaping him. His shoes are the color of the bloodhound besides their black soles which have met its broad forehead and met that forehead again a few other times in staccato succession. He is bleeding from his neck below the level of his eye and beneath darkness. He wears a white-and-blue plaid shirt and above it he wears the dog, he wears its leather fur its paws around his neck its claws his hands and his hands up and eight paws in total stumbling forward into darkness. Knocks a chair over but is still whole. Tries, maroons itself against the granite island briefly but is still whole still wretchedly united still washed in darkness is — they are knocking over another chair and still standing, leaning against itself and shoving. Towards a closet, closes door, locks and locks again. Split in half, he hears his coat. The two of them are baying separate symphonies. Light will come through the door, he thinks, reaches for his phone and dials twitching-handed. Misdialed four times; his hands against him again. Waited. When they found him in the closet he was sitting in his drool and in his neckstuff head down in hands sleeping.

The dog sits twitching, dreaming, stirring by no wind in an urn in the backyard. Son demanded better than a shoebox. On the way back from the fishmarket he listens to bleak jazz and in the house he sits and drinks his water meekly, no violence. He’s beaten it out of himself and it is dead. And all the better to have no violence. All the better to sit in darkness, to smoke and pray some second car arrives.