Knots

I told Javi that Tulip was missing.

“You know her leash is faulty,” I said. “If she jumps around too much, it just snaps right out of the harness.”

It was a plausible story. She’d escaped from both of us at one time or another, stealing a few moments of freedom on account of a defective metal clasp. But we’d always been able to lure her back with a palmful of salmon-flavored training treats. We never got around to exchanging the leash for something better; we just got used to it.

Startled, Javi tossed his laptop aside and sprung from the couch.

He didn’t even look at me.

He rushed to the mudroom to pull on his slides.

“Why did you come back? How the fuck are we supposed to find her?” he asked me.

His voice was shaky, but his tone was condescending. And cruel. I felt like a subordinate employee. I just stood there, silent, holding the empty leash.

I watched his panic build as he ran into the pantry and emerged with the small pouch of chews.

“You’re just standing there. At least get the flashlights.”

It was always like this. It could be the apocalypse and I’d maintain my composure, but Javi was triggered by everything: a sound in the woods behind our house, a pricey electricity bill, a few missed breadcrumbs on the counter, one of Trump’s tweets, or my own sly comments. As easy as it was, I sort of delighted in upsetting him sometimes.

I closed the front door behind us as we entered the swampy night. I could see fireflies and gnats zipping in and out of my flashlight’s beam.

Our street was nearly pitch black, save for a few of our neighbors’ driveway lights. We were out in the boonies, in a brand-new subdivision full of modest cobblestone houses, and the streetlights weren’t scheduled to go up until the next month. I trailed Javi as I swatted away the insects buzzing around my ears. He was practically running, the small muscles in his pale calves swelling up and deflating like a pulse.

“Tulip!” he yelled.

“It’s late,” I said. “You’ll wake up the neighbors.”

“Fuck the neighbors. Tulip is out here somewhere.”

“She’s not gonna die.”

I didn’t know that definitively. I just wanted to antagonize him.

Javi huffed.

“Don’t do that right now.”

We went on like this for a few minutes, both of us bickering, Javi in a manic state. He kept yelling out Tulip’s name, like she’d really come running back, eager to be home. Like she’d ever actually listened to us.

“How are we going to have a baby if you can’t keep track of a dog?” Javi asked me.

If I had my way, we wouldn’t.

It rained the day we got married. It was just the two of us. We’d skipped a lavish wedding in favor of a month-long honeymoon in Europe.

We still lived in the city then.

We stood on the steps of City Hall under a single umbrella with a broken rib, dressed in business casual like we’d just left a staff meeting.

“Is this an omen?” I asked.

Javi laughed.

“It’s good luck, actually,” he said. “Wet knots are hard to untie.”

It took me a minute to get the reference.

I hoped he was right.

I was due for my six-month dental cleaning when we first moved to the South. I had a chatty hygienist, Maya, a forty-something woman so short she could barely fasten the lead apron around my neck. As she took my X-rays, she gabbed about her three boys, her deadbeat ex-husband, and her recent decision to finish her bachelor’s.

“I think my oldest is gonna be gay,” she said when I told her about Javi. “I love him no matter what.”

Fiction - First Place Jefferey Spivey

Urbandale, Iowa, USA

She said it proudly, as if she should be commended for loving her own child.

When she finished, she brought in the head dentist, Dr. Karter, a man with freckled, tanned skin and sandy blond hair I could tell was dyed.

“What do you think about bleaching your teeth?” he asked, lifting my upper lip with his gloved fingers. “It’s on the house, the mold, the bleach, everything.”

“That would be great, I guess,” I said.

He asked me to stick out my tongue and pinched it with his thumb and index finger, gently moving it around as he examined.

“I’m sure your wife would love it,” he said.

“His husband,” Maya said softly.

“What was that?”

“His husband, Dr. Karter.”

“Oh,” he said, a bit confused, still holding my tongue.

He didn’t acknowledge it, instead telling me I had great teeth, no cavities and no problem areas to keep an eye on. He wished all his patients took care of their teeth like I did. He was clearly overcompensating to mask his discomfort. On his way out, he welcomed me to the area.

“I hope you and your wife enjoy your time here,” he said and then disappeared down the hallway.

Maya shrugged, as if to say, What can you do?

No one was holding my tongue then, but I stayed quiet.

Javi suggested we split up. He took off toward Airport Road, I went down one of the side streets.

I half-assed it, listlessly swinging the flashlight back and forth, searching for nothing, finding only stray cedar beetles or cracks in the sidewalk.

We’d lived in the neighborhood for nearly six months, and I still hadn’t gotten my bearings.

The overwhelming homogeneity of our neighbors.

The constant odor of manure from a nearby farm.

The silence, save for occasional gusts of wind or the crickets’ nightly song.

The unforgiving southern sun, casting everything in oranges and reds as if our lives were boiling.

The vast nothingness of the night sky.

I missed ambulance sirens and strangers’ conversations and Latin trap music blaring from passing cars. I missed light pollution and mystery drips and smelly subway stations. I missed sunbathing at Sheep Meadow and being within walking distance of an Irish pub and having vegan ice cream delivered at one a.m.

Rural life was far too quiet, or maybe my thoughts were too loud.

The decision to move south wasn’t ours, it was Javi’s. He worked in marketing for a small consumer products company that manufactured household goods like paper towels, antibacterial wipes, and all-purpose cleaners. All year, he had speculated. There’d been talk about opening a new satellite office, to nurture the company’s relationship with an influential national retailer.

Talk became negotiations, negotiations became an offer, and Javi didn’t loop me in until after he’d accepted.

“Why would you say yes to that?” I asked one night during dinner.

“It’s my career. I didn’t have a choice.”

“You could’ve said no.”

“And end up in career purgatory?” he asked. “Or lose my job and expect you to support us?”

I went quiet for a moment, taking bite after bite of the flavorless, well-done salmon he’d made.

I’d been unemployed for nearly a year, laid off from a magazine where I worked as one of two assistants to the publisher. But I thought of it as more of a sabbatical, a chance to figure out what I really wanted. We were able to live comfortably off his salary, and I had some savings. Financially at least, not much had changed.

Still, he never missed a chance to point out that he was the breadwinner.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said.

But I knew he did.

We had a big farewell dinner the week before we left, a mixed crowd of his friends and mine. In the downtime between the entrees and dessert, Javi made his way around the table, chatting, laughing, occasionally dabbing at the corners of his eyes with a tissue.

My best friend Lena plopped down into his seat.

“Of all the choices you’ve made, this has to be the strangest one,” she said.

“I didn’t choose to leave the city,” I said.

“But you’re staying with Javi, you’re going with him. That’s a choice.”

She made this stern face, like a mother, that mix of concern and consternation. Her matronly demeanor was at odds with the sleek, long ponytail of horsehair hanging down her back.

“I’m married. It’s more like an obligation.”

“That doesn’t sound any better.”

It didn’t. It made love and marriage and Javi seem like chores. Maybe they were. I liked to think that moving was the massive chore, relocating your entire life to a new place. The many tedious tasks to be done, things to be opened and put away, anxieties to be soothed. In the process, inevitably, some things were bound to get lost or broken.

But this was all part of holy matrimony, too, even when we were standing still. In sickness and health, till death do us part, no part of the experience as joyful as the moment we uttered those words. Decisions were joint, hardly centered around what I wanted. This move, like so many other things, was for us, but not necessarily for me.

Not to paint myself as some saint, sacrificing my preferred way of life for my family or guarding the sanctity of our vows. The alternative – me heartbroken, jobless, and alone in one of the nation’s most expensive metros – wasn’t an option. Obligation may not have fit my or Lena’s marriage ideal, but it was my unvarnished marriage reality.

Tulip was meant to be a test for us. We’d started out with a plant, a fiddle leaf fig, and if we could keep it alive, we’d move on to a dog. If we managed not to kill the dog, then we’d be ready for a kid. At least theoretically.

The fiddle leaf fig didn’t die.

And it survived the trip down south.

Once we got settled, we went to the county shelter.

We saw at least three dogs that were cuter than Tulip, but there was some kind of restriction. Either the shelter was holding them for a minimum number of days, out of fear that they were just lost and would be claimed, or someone had already filed paperwork to adopt them.

We were frustrated and headed for the exit when I saw her. A puny rat terrier, with big, asymmetrical black spots all over her white coat. I knelt down and stuck my fingers through the wire caging. She smelled them and then licked them intensely like they were chicken bones.

She had these big, brown eyes, so inquisitive, and apparently quite manipulative because I gave in almost immediately. I told Javi I wanted her.

We took her out to a little dog park on the shelter’s property to get to know her, just to be sure she liked us. We were all compatible.

When we got her home a few days later, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

She peed everywhere, in our bedroom, in the spare rooms, on the mat by the front door, any plush, fluffy space that was soft like grass. For a time, the house reeked, the sour, acidic smell of dog piss searing our nostrils every time we walked in.

Javi said it was inhumane to keep her in a kennel, so we let her roam free whenever we went out. But we hadn’t bought her a lot of toys. When she grew bored, she made her own, out of our magazines, our shoes, our furniture. When I found one of my Wellingtons shredded in the living room, I put my foot down. We bought a crate the next morning.

Because I wasn’t working, Tulip was my responsibility.

I walked her several times a day.

I fed her.

I trained her.

I scolded her.

I was so lax in my own life, yet I’d become a disciplinarian. I taught her commands, and I updated Javi daily on which words to use or the right ways to reward her or where her favorite potty spots were.

Tulip consumed me.

But I didn’t consume her.

As soon as Javi came home from work, she flocked to him and stayed with him the rest of the day. On weekends, she slept next to him. When she wanted to go out or be fed, she went to him. I put in all the work, he reaped all the benefits.

Javi spoiled her. He fed her from the table, he snuck her treats, he played with her. He never told her no or enforced boundaries. He gave in to her every whim.

I resented him for it.

And I feared parenthood would be the same way, the bulk of the work falling on one of us, the child valuing one’s contribution over the other’s.

I wondered if it would be more consuming. If I’d spend all my time cleaning up messes and speaking one-word sentences in a high-pitched, palliative voice and giving everything to a little bloodsucking

being while leaving nothing for me.

I told all of this to Lena, and she told me I was being ridiculous.

Chill the fuck out, she texted.

You’re right, I’m being crazy.

I got a text from Javi that we should head back. He hadn’t found Tulip, neither had I. We’d go back home, report her missing, and let the county handle it. He said it would all work out. He seemed to have calmed down, at least to a more manageable mania.

As I walked back toward the house, I saw something four-legged and furry scurry across the street. It moved too fast for me to make out its color or see its face.

Could it have been Tulip, still taking a joy run through the neighborhood?

But another four-legged, furry thing followed close behind it. This one I could see. The bushy, striped tail of a raccoon.

Though my heart had fluttered a bit at the thought of finding her and arriving home victorious, the feeling quickly subsided. I hadn’t been looking for her out there in the darkness.

Just before I reached the house, I heard my name.

“Brendan!”

It was Jessa, a neighbor from across the street. Jessa was my age, and her husband was a bit older like Javi, but they had three small children, all under the age of 7. She always seemed frazzled when I saw her during the day, hustling the kiddos into her SUV while tugging at her leggings; borderline drunk when I saw her at night, still in her leggings. I attributed both states to parenthood.

“Brendan! Come have a drink with me.”

I walked over to her front porch. She was sitting in a rocking chair with a mason jar full of a clear liquid, likely vodka or store-bought moonshine. She always wanted to hang. It was like she was trying to escape her life and reclaim the messy young adulthood she’d missed.

“Have you seen Tulip running around?” I asked.

“Oh no, did she get loose? Poor thing!”

Jessa hadn’t seen her.

I told her that Javi was frantic, and she said a cocktail would calm him down. I laughed at that and promised her we’d stop by another time, when we weren’t in crisis.

“You know, I’d love to set one of mine loose, just to have a break,” she said as I crossed the street. She giggled loudly at her own joke.

She probably wasn’t serious. Still, Jessa and I were on the same page.

The month before, Javi had arranged a call for us with a gay couple who’d recently surrogated. Reese and Kevin lived in L.A. and their daughter Alana was three months old. Javi spoke in a formal voice like it was a work call.

Reese was the Javi of their relationship. He shared most of the details about their experience, everything from researching the agencies to communicating with the birth mother. At one point, we heard Alana cry and Reese directed Kevin to get a bottle and go to another room. His tone was sharp and commanding, and I thought about how I’d want to slap Javi if he talked to me that way.

Javi asked if there was anything they’d do differently.

Reese went through some more procedural things, like handling some of the legal paperwork on their own instead of paying a lawyer. Nothing revelatory. But he was struck by something just as we were hanging up.

“Oh, there is one thing,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know if we were ready ready, you know what I mean. We jumped into this cause we were worried about being too old or starting too late, and I’m not sure we had enough time for just us.”

I looked at Javi nodding, straightfaced. We didn’t know this man and yet he was listing out Javi’s rationale for surrogacy almost verbatim.

“Just make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons, at a time that’s right for you and your marriage.”

After the call, I felt more confused than I had before. The whole process seemed long and expensive and frightening.

“I think we should do it,” Javi said.

I just looked at him.

“We can’t keep waiting. I don’t want to be 70 with a kid in high school.”

“You’re not that old,” I told him.

“You’re not as young as you think you are.”

“But you heard what Reese said, that part about having enough time for us. Have we had that yet?”

“Are you asking if we’ve had enough time or if you have?”

It was easy to let Tulip go. We’d been walking for almost twenty minutes and she hadn’t so much as peed. She sensed something in the woods and started barking and pulling me into the grass. She’d found a piece of something on the sidewalk and eaten it whole before I could stop her. I was just over it.

Over her not loving me as much as I loved her.

Over the monotony of each day, being alone with her in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Over him holding his success over my head.

Over him cutting his eyes at me and scolding me.

Over being lost.

It was time for someone or something else to be lost. I couldn’t take it anymore.

I unlatched her leash. She looked back at me to verify that she’d been loosed. Then she took off, so free, so unafraid of what she might encounter.

I felt relieved. She was gone. I knew this was terrible of me, but she was so much to handle. It was all so much to handle.

I thought that maybe I could tell Javi this, now that he’d calmed down. I’d worked out the most sympathetic way to narrate the story by the time I’d walked in. But I couldn’t even get a word out.

“I already called the Animal Control emergency line and gave them Tulip’s microchip number,” he said. “And I posted something in the Facebook group in case anyone sees her.”

“Okay,” I said flatly, walloped by his energy.

My response wound Javi up again.

“I don’t get it, Brendan. You wanted her, you picked her, and yet you’re so apathetic. It doesn’t make sense.”

He wasn’t wrong.

But I disputed it anyway.

“I’m not apathetic. That’s harsh.”

“It feels like I’m the only one freaking out.”

“You’re always the only one freaking out.”

He rolled his eyes at me and stormed off to our room, slamming the door behind him. I resolved not to chase him. If he wanted to throw a tantrum, fine. In that moment, I wondered if it wasn’t just Tulip I needed to set free.

I knew Javi was a piece of work from the beginning. We had our first argument right after I moved in with him.

He was making dinner and he’d asked me to pick up a bottle of wine on my way home. I was coming from happy hour with Lena. It was a particularly boozy evening, so of course I forgot. I showed up buzzed, empty-handed, only realizing my error once I saw the disappointment on his face.

“Was it really so hard?” he asked me, but in a deeply condescending way, like he was my father. He had his back turned and was stirring a marinara sauce on the stove.

“I’ll just run back out and grab something. It’s not a big deal,” I said. 137

“So what I want isn’t a big deal?”

“That seems a tad bit dramatic,” I said.

He swirled around to look at me, and he seemed so much older then, with his furrowed brows and all the creases in his forehead.

“If this is gonna work, you have to realize that there are two of us here. It’s not only about what matters to you.”

“Javi, I didn’t do this to slight you. I really just forgot. I’ll go get the fucking wine.”

I left and slammed the door behind me, for extra effect, not because I was that angry. I just wanted to make a point. He’d definitely overreacted, and I questioned what I’d done, merging my life with his and settling into his space. Would it always be like this?

He’d cooled off by the time I returned, this time with the wine. He rushed toward me and apologized and kissed me. I apologized, too, though I wasn’t sure I’d really done anything that wrong.

It took me a while to feel okay with everything, us living together, committing to each other, me following his rules. But I stuck around.

At least back then, it felt like the right thing to do.

Javi locked me out of our bedroom, so I camped out in one of the guest rooms. As I lay there, I heard a pack of coyotes howling off in the distance. One of Javi’s coworkers had told us that meant they’d eaten something. What if that something was Tulip?

That hadn’t been my intention, for her to become some wild animal’s main

course. I just wanted her to be someone else’s problem. I wanted to have different problems, like deciding what nightclub list to get on or which restaurant opening to go to, instead of googling what it meant when Tulip’s poop was runny.

I got nervous then.

I should’ve just talked to Javi. That would’ve been the sensible thing.

I could’ve told him I was nervous, that I wanted more time for us, that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted it to be more than us.

I heard some scratching at the back door then, and the handle jiggling, like a person with a numb hand was trying desperately to get in and failing. I opened the spare bedroom door.

“Javi,” I called out. “Babe, do you hear that?”

No answer. His cold shoulder was strong.

I walked over and flipped on the light. I saw the outline of a dog through the blinds. She was back.

Her tail wagged violently back and forth once she was inside. Her tongue hung out the side of her mouth dripping saliva on the floor, and she panted like she’d just run miles. Maybe she had.

She beelined for her water bowl and then went straight for the bedroom, for Javi. She barely even acknowledged me. Even Tulip was upset with me.

She sat on her hindlegs, panting and whining.

I called for Javi again.

“She’s back. She’s not dead,” I yelled.

Still nothing.

Fuck him, I thought.

I knew he’d get over it. He always did.

Besides, I wasn’t talented enough at sabotage to actually ruin things. If I really wanted to upset him, I had to do something more destructive. Something bigger and more disruptive. If I wanted to live a different life, maybe I just had to start living it on my own, instead of pushing him in a different direction or expecting him to give me leeway.

Tulip looked at me as I walked out of the front door. For the second time that night, I set out on a search mission, but this time for something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find.

I looked across the street at Jessa, still on her porch nursing her drink.

“Up for some company?” I called to her.

She waved me over enthusiastically and patted the seat of the empty rocking chair next to hers.

I eased down the driveway, ready for whatever the night had in store.

“Where’s that yummy husband of yours?” she asked me once I had cold Pinot Grigio in my hands, in one of those lidded wine tumblers meant for suburban lushes.

“He’s doing his own thing tonight,” I said.

“My guy, too. Sometimes we need our own things, or else we’ll go crazy. We’ve been married almost ten years and that’s the secret, spending time apart. Who would’ve thought?”

This should’ve been an ah-ha moment, but it depressed me. I was trying again to rebel, to sneak off and spend time away without telling him my whereabouts, cause I thought it’d piss him off. I thought he wouldn’t be able to stand the thought of me having a separate life.

But according to Jessa, I wasn’t spiting him, I was protecting us.

“Does he ever get mad at you?” I asked her.

“Oh honey, I’d be worried if he liked me all the time.”

We laughed and sipped, and I relaxed.

I always felt like what was happening between Javi and I was unique to us, like no other couple went through these moments of turbulence. But I wasn’t special, we weren’t special. These things happened to everyone.

And everyone got over them.

Javi would get over it.

I would get over it.

And we’d be okay.

Until the next thing.

I got back home, sufficiently drunk. The bedroom was still locked. I called out Javi’s name once, hoping that the night’s events were behind us. Tulip barked back in response. I knew he was awake then. There was no way he could sleep through her piercing yelp.

Still, he didn’t open the door for me.

I sat on the floor in the hallway, only meaning to wait there a few minutes, reasoning that he wouldn’t want to go to bed angry. That old marital wisdom was something we’d always honored. If he didn’t give in though, I’d just sleep on the couch or in the guest room, like a nineties sitcom husband.

I tried my best to fight off sleep. But I would’ve needed a carjack to keep my eyelids open.

I passed out there on the floor, resting my head against the wall, waiting to be let in.