Chorizo

There are bright, absurd moments hidden in the day, secondary to whatever else I'm doing but persistent.

"Where's the dog?"

I know where the dog isn't. The dog isn't in the kitchen. The dog isn't on the back of the couch, curled tight but eyes open and staring out the window. The dog isn't in my lap, the place he preferred, sighing every time I drum colored pencil dust off a drawing and onto the floor.

The dog is where dogs go when they die. Or the dog is still a memory of habit being overlapped each day by the habit of his absence. Or the dog is in the ground on a friend's farm. Or the dog isn't anywhere, a place and an answer I resist arriving at because it's too painful. After we took out the bathroom trash two weeks ago, trash that included the messy beach towel where Chorizo slept his last night, I went there. The truth and the painful place.

He's gone.

There was a woman at my childhood church who'd lost her young son. I sense a little now what I could only marvel at then when she would clip her fingernails into her open purse during the quietest moments of the service. Any little thing to drag your fork across the world's plate, a screech you now find comforting precisely because it grates.