Dog on Fire by Terese Svoboda

Author:Terese Svoboda [Svoboda, Terese]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000 FICTION / Literary
Publisher: Nebraska

27

Mom says, Get over him, he’s dead.

I could throw my damn butterfly costume at her. I don’t. I hang it in the closet.

Mom doesn’t notice. She only notices what she has to. When Dad used to get angry, she hid in the bathroom, never noticing me. I would have hid in the bathroom too, except for all the leaks in there. On a rainy day, you could take a shower without even turning it on. It got so we put the shower curtain up along the ceiling, it was so wet. She said those were her tears coming down the side of the wall. Her saying that just made me angry, even when I was little and confused. We had a door that opened—even the bathroom door opened—and she could have walked away from him and taken me with her. At least that’s what they were always telling her at that restaurant she worked at. That’s where we once had to sleep in a booth all night.

That’s true—he’s dead, I say.

When I look up from the hole I have been boring into the closet wall with my not-sharp nail, she says, You have to move on.

I look back into the closet. Am I looking for something? Like a dad? I’m the one who always said to people my dad died early. After he abused me so much people noticed and he got put away, there we still were, with a wet ceiling. I never got pregnant. I think that’s because I was heavy already and whatever seeds got lost inside me and rotted.

Move to where? I can’t move, I say slowly. I can hardly make half the rent here.

A Quickee Mart is opening on the highway, says Mom, and I see her hand coming around to finger my costume that she knows is too small for her. No more beds. You’ll soon make plenty, she says. And think of all those candy bars you can sneak for yourself. She sighs. You’re just too darn depressed to have around is all. She picks up some of the stuff she herself threw to the floor. I’m going to have a live-in boyfriend, and I don’t want you to ruin it.

Mom—

I’ll give you a month.

I leave the bedroom and go stand in the pantry, getting the door almost completely shut. I see we’ve used up almost all the toilet paper. Then I go to sit in Sport for a while. Sport, I say. It’s cold in here.

I drive around, burn gas, and park behind the railroad loading area. Trains don’t stop here anymore. They rush by in the middle of the night, real noisy and filled with coal. When I was in high school and couldn’t go home because Mom had some other boyfriend, this is where I would stay. Nobody even goes here to kiss. It’s a little harder to hide with a car, but it’s dark now. I fool with my phone. Here I know I’ll sleep happy, my head against his shirt, the one I stretched over the seat.

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