Short Fiction
all the things the men in their lives couldn’t hope to understand. They cried together, and promised to meet on a day when all their children would play in the sun and be photographed for parenting magazines. They dreamed together when fertility clinics had given up hope. If Denise hadn’t worked at a fertility clinic, if she hadn’t seen so many women like herself flip through the pages of baby catalogues they would never use, she wouldn’t have needed the television. But the years had stripped the pity from her, leaving her to watch documentaries about conjoined twins or shark attack victims before she could log on. She understood if she couldn’t grieve, if even for herself, there was no place for her in the world.
Fox Fox watched the sports report alone in bed while the dog he greatly envied ignored him. His dog was a cock-a-poo, the result of suburban science’s efforts to minimize everything masculine in the world. When he looked down at his dog casually licking his paws clean, he saw the great progression of dogs running wild in the forest tearing apart deer, to dogs being taught to beg for peanut butter flavored bones and mouth “I love you” by housewives, all the way down to dogs like his own who were woolly mild-mannered things afraid of laundry baskets. His dog was evidence of the hands of women shrinking the wildness of the world into cute packages they could shoo away. At that moment he never felt closer to the dog he named Whiskey to annoy his wife. Together they lived in a home neither of them owned, and kept to themselves to avoid the tasks his wife might assign them. They had been domesticated. Whiskey was a stop-gap measure, a stand-in until his wife had a child. That was four years ago, when the nightstand next to their bed held condoms and massage oil. Now next to the bed medical journals laid stacked under an ovulation kit that measured the hormone levels of his wife’s saliva. Fox watched Whiskey roll onto his back and grin, completely unaware that the world around him was heading south. “Are you coming to bed?” Fox called down the hall, as he absently scratched Whiskey’s belly. Only the sound of keystrokes answered as he switched off the lamp. Atticus Review│Get Lit: Round 1
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