"Loving Thing" by Stacy Gnall

Loving Thing

Stacy Gnall At first, it looks like two hands, clasped and thrust up from the rubble. Or like a rabbit turned, stretched to reach its side and preen sun-first in the dirt. You blink, and it is neither of these. Blink. Or it is somehow both at once. You squat and squint your eyes, to see what you can see—if it is a loving or an unloving thing.

You’ve read the codes, how many times? Recited them when the hours got longest at the plant. And during the night’s most unyielding hours, you’ve recounted their cant. Sometimes, when the dog’s age made her restless, you’d stroke her head, speak them in the good girl voice she recognized. For an hour, two—your slow palm, going with the grain of her graying head. Good girl, she’d hear with what hearing she had left. Like a clocktower a town over announcing the hour: Good girl, good girl, good girl.

A loving thing was like this. It came when called, softened at your touch. Was made glad when you gifted it a glance. It was a metal one could melt to molding, a root that sustained long after the stew. Loving things had use.

The old girl had been getting more difficult to hide. She only weighed half a canto, but after her shoulder had slipped from its socket on a routine scout, she was quick to fall and needed to be carried most everywhere. You hid out with her all spring and early summer so she wouldn’t be found. And you spoke the codes to her over and over, her steady moans providing them structure, until she hobbled out of the hovel one morning and glanced back at you to follow. She had returned to a loving thing, so it was safe for

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her to be seen. But any minute, you knew, her shoulder might slip back out of place, rendering her unloving again.

You call her over, glad that you taught her hand signals along with the spoken commands when she was a pup. Glad that hearing is actually no matter, since she can smell what you want from her even better. She’s been trained to tell loving from unloving things.

And now, she knows you need her. The old girl rises from her rest, trots to you across the dry, rusty earth with head level and steps measured, with supreme purpose. A bone might slip, sure, but deep down it will know what it knows.

You point to the clasped-handed thing with your own two hands, one over the other in the shape of a cross and, although she can hardly hear the words, say Dara, suss—half out of habit, half because she’s taught you that intentions all have their scents, too.

Dara, suss.

The old girl locks in and lowers her nose, bends in a half-bow to better smell the ground. Her sniffs are first quick and in quantity, given to the whole of the thing. Then, they slow—a few long, deep drags at a few select jags. She thrusts up her chin, cocks her head to the wind, borrows a few whiffs before re-focusing. She cocks her head again—this time at the height of the thing, and holds it there.

She wants the earth to tell her more.

And just like that, she’s done it. She spins a circle once before letting out a low yowl, digging rhythmically at the ground with both front paws. It’s a loving thing, It’s a loving thing, she is saying; this is the sign that it is a loving thing. You scritch her ear, rustle the fur on her neck with a knuckle, say Good girl, good girl. And this is all the reward she requires. Dara spins one last circle—not as a sign this time, but out of joy for a job done right—before she returns to her rest beside you, satisfied.

It is late afternoon, and a cloud slips across the sun, lending sudden and much-needed shade to you and Dara, to the object

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half out of ground, to the few birds in the trees that you can hear but cannot see. You stand for a long instant, dumb silent in this new shadow.

She’s wrong, the old girl, you know it. But she has never been wrong before. Scout outward. Uncover and identify. Loving or unloving thing—which of the bins to place it in for collection. It’s what she’s been bred for, bonded to you for. What the marrow in her bones rings bells for.

You’re young among the other scouts, though you’ve been at it long enough to know what the code calls for now. What it calls for you to do. But for as many times as you’ve recited it, at the plant while sorting collections, or at night when your realist brain has you dreaming of doing the same, for as often as you’ve spoken it out loud, without thinking, while hiding with Dara in some makeshift mountain shelter until she was well enough, the words vanish now just as soon as they rise. Like a pheasant disappearing into the brush, you read somewhere, once.

You’ve been at it long enough to know, too, that the handrabbit thing is earthen, a thick shank of bark, perhaps, a fossil from the trees that once covered this place. You know this. And that is why you’ve been chosen—to scout out here, farther than any of the living have ever been.

In the first few pages of the illustrated codes, a graph charts the rate of “use-value” loss. An orange star marks the loving thing’s “inciting flaw.” The value swiftly descends from there, as if falling from a sheer cliff face, to a red star—so far below that it is outside the graph’s borders. This represents its being an unloving thing, far past having any use. A compromise to collections is a compromise to community it reads, centered in large type at the top of the page.

Just as it does on every page.

You are sitting cross-legged, just a few chits from the thing, scritching Dara’s ear absently as a pellet of sweat drips between your jacket and skin, and you half-think. A call comes in on the

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hip-con: a cheep-cheep from dispatch wanting an update on your sector. You ignore it.

In the preface to the complete codes, there is a cautionary tale.

It is about a scout called Rhodes and his scouting dog Spitoon, whose turn to unloving Rhodes did not respond to per protocol.

None of the living fully know why. But when he failed to do as the code directed, they did it for him. It was swift, the text said, but sure. Then Rhodes was loaded up, alongside the dead Spitoon, for final transport to the Rough Edges. The story concluded: And let this, fledgling scout, be a lesson to YOU. The old girl is wrong, and you know it. And although she has never been wrong, has never been asked to do so twice in a row since her training, she rises without question or hesitation to reassess the thing—before you have even given her the sign. And sure enough she’s soon spinning, letting out a low yowl where you see nothing, digging rhythmically with her front paws at the ground.

The cloud has completed its sashay, returning some sun your way. Again, the hip-con cheeps, and you scoot close to the clasped-rabbit thing without answering. Dara follows—no longer in scouting form, but still close and curious at your side. Since she has sussed twice, she has cleared it of much of its dirt and must. It is more visible, far more clear, thrust up higher from the ground now, and you see: it’s a hip-con—not like yours, but an older model, from when the buttons were manual and stuck out awkward as elbows. A few of this one’s knobs are chipped, a few half-eroded from age. You reach for it, take it in your hands, the last of the debris slipping free, and the con’s back panel falls with it, sounding a soft thud on the ground between your knees.

No, that’s not the back panel. It is a hunk of fossilized wood like you’d first thought, left nestled against the con and buried together, so close that it had all seemed like one piece.

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No. It’s not that either.

You turn it in your hands, shift it from your right to your left to your right, tilting your head with it as you would to catch a prism’s full iridescence, and you realize: it is an organ—a liver? or a heart?—somehow preserved in the sandy earth, shriveled now and mostly hard. You remember learning that this can happen, that this has happened—how the dead poor actually made better mummies than the elite they had lived for. How they kept fresher, archaeologists had found, buried straight in the silt, far more so than those who had been shrouded in gold.

You only know so much about such things, but you do know that the organ is too small to be human. You look up from it, gaze out away far-off into the distance, your eyes landing somewhere on the craggy, bare hills—but not really seeing. It is suddenly heavy in your palms. It must be a dog’s.

The sun has returned in full effect, and Dara has jogged a ways off, is digging again in a plume of coppery dust. You call her to you, but she is spinning. She glances your way, then jaunts a few chits farther and is soon sniffing and digging some more. In this light, her fur is so bright-white that it is nearly violet. You sit on your heels and watch her spin against the backdrop of a towering bluff. Ah. This is where they go. This is where they go when they can’t follow code. They’ve sent you to the Rough Edges, you realize with a nod.

How long had they guessed? How long had they known, long before you ever could, that you’d have never followed the code?

That your loyalty to the cause would falter, worse than Dara’s shoulder? How long had they been prepping you, pumping you up? To believe them when they congratulated you and said you were chosen, special, for this special scouting?

You aren’t sure what to do, but you get up and walk to Dara instead of asking her to come to you. And you continue on in the

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direction you were headed, away from the city. You walk, letting her lead the way, and every few chits the old girl is spinning.

Spinning here is a loving thing and spinning there is a loving thing, and the sun is hissing its hot brand on your neck, and you gather your strength for two. You will walk until you are tired, until you or the old girl can go no more. And you’ll stop there, wherever you are, together, so close it’s as though you’re one piece. But for now, you scan the Rough Edges for a promising ridge—the hip-con cheepcheeping—leaving a sea of loving and unloving things behind.