Short Story
Music Minus One WORDS BY Sebastian Bennett
Don’t worry. At the edge of the driveway is Glover, the happy pooch with a clotted tail and yellowed teeth. He is bounding and loping, and then he is next to you, pressing his head against your thigh. He will pant and drool while you stroke him for hours, never too long. From the back of his throat comes a low friendly whine, the kind of whine that sounds harmonic, cadenced—even almost human—and stops while you rub under his neck or behind his soft, flopping ears. “Good, Glover,” you say, and pat the heaving chest and lumpy shoulder, allowing the dog to get hairs on you, a ribbon of golden fur down the inseam of your black jeans. Now Glover has wiggled between your legs, and he is pushing his nose into your crotch. Why do dogs always do that? It’s so embarrassing, especially when you’re at your boyfriend’s house on a date and he only laughs. But you don’t mind because you love Glover, with the bad breath and dislocated pelvic disks that make him drag his hind feet when he wakes up from a nap. Yes, you love your dog, even though you haven’t seen him for five months. Glover remembers. He remembers your perfume perhaps. Of course he understands that you thought about him and missed him while you were away at college without any pets at all—except for the cricket that lived in the corner of the dorm room and only chirped during the day (you had an agreement), and it never spit or dripped out any brown juice, ever. Crickets do that, they say . . . Glover has a tick. A gumdrop-sized, fat gray tick with an embedded head deep under the skin of the poor old dog’s front leg. You swallow and clench teeth as you pluck it—pop it—off the white “glove” of his foreleg, which is how he got his name. You have to wash your hands when you get inside, must remember. Now you just stroke Glover’s head, the tips of your finger in the fur of his crown, around the bony bump in the middle. Is that the cerebral ridge? You gaze deep into the dog’s round, dull eyes. He has cataracts, poor thing. He looks back at you. Sometimes you can actually see trust; it comes as a gleam. Glover missed you. He loves you, and it’s okay that his hind legs leave eczema skin flakes on your shoes. “Hoh! Melinda’s back!” The deep resonant voice of your father, Max, comes from one of the top windows of that huge Colorado timber house which seems very old because Max built it from used NEW READER MAGAZINE | 55