Where the Lost Dogs Go by Susannah Charleson

Author:Susannah Charleson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

There were many good days in that crazy little ’60s tract house on an old air force base. My parents had shaken off the shadows of their recent disasters, and we seemed more sure-footed as a family. Mom sewed lime-green gingham curtains for me, and for my new bed my father painted a century-old four-poster white. It felt like I was staying and like they didn’t already have one foot out the door for somewhere else. Archy and Mehitabel seemed right at home, too. The kittens liked to dash through the long house and then slide into my room at the end of it like they were stealing home plate.

My father told me that Mom had suffered what was called a nervous breakdown. She had briefly lost the ability to read and write. She launched herself into nursing school anyway, picking her way through texts deep into the night until every word got a little clearer. I can still see her beneath the crook-neck pole lamp, haloed in the smoke from her Viceroy, scooting claw-prickly kittens off the pages as she read. Mom made flash cards in a shaky hand that steadily improved. I watched her bite her lip and manage block print on the little lined cards, stiff uprights for the D’s and T’s and K ’s and precise curls for the B’s and P ’s, as I had done in first grade.

I sat on the couch cross-legged and pored through her Anatomy and Physiology text while she worked. That book fascinated me with its bizarre words and curious descriptions and especially with its illustrations of the human body overlaid with transparent colored plates. I liked the feel of those transparent pages in my fingers, the rich colors in the art of human innards. Each human body started with a paper page and a simple outline. That body would get bones with one transparent plate overlay, and then organs, and ligaments, tendons, muscles, and skin with another and another and another. Mom was quick to fury if I disturbed any of her bookmarks, but I was careful, and I flipped through those A&P transparency plates again and again, making men and women whole, riding the thin edge of my private fears, because I had a secret: I was terrified of skeletons.

It was a fear that began when I was a toddler, and I distinctly remember its origins in two old movies that they were already airing on TV when I was very small. One of them was Teenagers from Outer Space (1959), a black-and-white film about an alien teenager who abandons his crew’s mission to eradicate life on Earth when he falls for a human girl. Originally titled The Ray Gun Terror, that film’s alien weapons could vaporize humans down to skeletal remains, and the aliens blasted plenty of people in their quest to clear the planet and breed water-tower-sized lobsters. The plot’s inherent goofiness went right over my head when I was three or four, and images from Teenagers from

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