Skylight by Carol Muske-Dukes

Author:Carol Muske-Dukes [Muske-Dukes, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8484-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-30T20:54:00+00:00

Golden Retriever

She was the one who put her tongue

to the whetstone on its rickety wheel

in the Tool Room. The wheel spun,

the tongue arched in its bud and bent

against that dizzy syllable of grit.

Still she could never say what she meant.

When she had her tenth birthday cake

that winter, she stuttered her thanks for

the new blades, skated backward on the rink

into a room holding the sunset. The snow was falling

in it, unstoppered, odorless as chloroform.

Under the x’ed surface of the ice hung

a gold tuft from the day her brother flooded

and made the retriever sit in the wet as it

hardened. He was a pup then, but was trained to obey.

It made him mean, doing what anyone said to do,

but he did it all the same. Down in the rec

room, she pushed 12 on the Rock-Ola and the

records wobbled on their neon stalk, the red

planets circled each other inside the glass.

It was a room for fun, they said, and though

it was, it still lit up with loss, the kind that

comes from debts collected. Or so she imagined—

piano and pool table: odd courtesies of foreclosure.

On the polished bar a lit triptych said Hamm’s

Beer, its waterfall of blue tinsel rippling behind

the beaver paddling a canoe up front. The retriever,

trained to hunt, would point for minutes at a dying

bird, then fetch whatever you sent him for—till

he bit a neighbor’s child who touched his unhealed sore.

What happened happened. No cause and effect connected

her tongue and her troubled heart and never would. The pain

came on its own and pointed for minutes at whatever

was wounded before her. In the end, she might have

to break its neck, because of that pain. Maybe

she imagined a family on the edge of a windy precipice

and—just like that, retrieved them as she stood at

the opened door of the jukebox, sliding in a few new

disks for her dad. Maybe she could bring back his hand

on her shoulder as they stood staring into the glass

juke singing “Rock Island Line.” A bird hurt bad

will wing-limp for acres to save itself. She knew

even then it was better to be dead than weaponed

in her way and laid down like a ragged prize

at the foot of his dream, his least sufficiency.

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