My Prose

In addition to poetry, I write personal essays and short stories.  Below is one of my essays; you can find more such writing on my blog.  Please refrain from copying or posting/publishing my work elsewhere without my permission.  Thank you, and thanks for reading!

–Anacelie Verde-Claro

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WITH ME

*

I have not walked my dog Isla in my neighborhood yet.

I have not walked in my neighborhood, period.  In my neighborhood, dogs jump their fences as though home is out on the cement and asphalt, and they’ve been mistakenly separated, again.  Wide diesel trucks hog the curbside, their large shadows drenching the gutters.  One boot-scoots around broken glass.  In the mornings, the streets glisten like dew from freshly smashed bottles.  Low cars with black mufflers and chipped paint charge like bulls toward the speed bumps.  There is a chip in almost everything in my  neighborhood:  the curbs, the tips of wood fences, window panes, stray cats’ tails.  Some of my neighbors have chips, big ones, on their shoulders.  I see them glare at whatever moves by them at stop signs.  Are they angry about having to stop, though time gets to move on?  I don’t know, I don’t ask, why my neighborhood feels like a neglected farm whose owners ran to the city in search of something else, leaving their ranch hands, their sense of purpose, abandoned.

Isla has a chip in her, too, inside her brain–it’s one that short-circuits if a dog too close to her walks, paces, or runs past.  She rears up like a bucking bronco, yanks on my arm, and barks with so much force her snout vibrates.  And so I drive her three miles away to the retired folks’ neighborhood where driveways are vacant, the trees are always still, and one hears only the faint carpet-and-drape-muffled yip of a bored lap dog.

When Isla pulls, I tell her, “With me.”  That’s where I want her, next to me, content, the two of us one relaxed unit, our feet in rhythm together, unfazed by the dogs, cars, birds, and people of our bubble-shaped panorama.  Isla defaulting into a short-circuited loop of repetitive bark!-bark!-bark! frustrates me.  I keep telling her, “No barking.”  I don’t know if she hears me; in the heat of the moment, I cannot top her atom-splitting decibels.  But that is what I say to her–it’s the only thing I can say.  It seems self-evident:  stop the barking, stop the short-circuiting.  I don’t know if Isla is aware of herself in relation to other things.  Right now her world is small, and I don’t just mean her physical world of me, the house, the car, the retired folks’ neighborhood.  The world of her mind has so few options.  I don’t know if I can branch her out of it.  I turn another corner, rein her in so she feels my bending knees.

*

I saw the rooster on a neighbor’s roof down the block.  I’ve been hearing this guy for a while, his displaced agrarian call in the middle of the city, and never saw him until I was driving and caught the black, crescent-shaped perch, poised north like a silhouetted weather vane on top of the flat-roofed house.

This rooster is what does it–I feel it in my hands and feet.  A call to action.  I click on Isla’s harness and leash and I’m walking her, walking myself, in my neighborhood for the first time.  I am taking her in the rooster’s proposed direction, north, straight up my street, called Chama.  I will walk us in the street, cleaner of glass than the sidewalk and gutter, and a few crucial feet away from chain-linked fences and the scruffy dogs hunkering like possessed shadows on the other side of them.

Going north on my street means turning right from the edge of the driveway.  As we turn, I see something at the end of the block.  It’s moving like how I imagine a ghost moves, so at first I think I’m imagining it.  I’m not.  A large, white dog, tall ears pricked as stiff as soldiers.  He paces erratically on the corner.  I’ve seen this dog before from my car, zig-zagging the streets and people’s yards.  He’s been here awhile, and it dawns on me where the mystery mound of excrement in my yard has come from.  It dawns on me, this dog knows who we are.  The white dog’s body moves side-to-side, while his head remains frozen, watching us.

Isla does not see him, and so before she does, I veer us left, going south, away from the rooster and his fortune-telling direction.  Isla pulls, as usual, but I keep the leash drawn behind my back so the force of her pull is absorbed by my larger back muscles and bones than by my tinier hand ones.  This also keeps Isla’s torso reined in by my side.  She yelps as I step on her paws.  ”Look straight ahead and you’ll walk straight.”  I say this out loud to her.  I say a lot of things out loud to Isla, things about her, or the weather, things I instantly forget as they streak behind in our wake.  I don’t look around me to see if anyone is watching or listening.  I’d rather not know, one way or another.  I focus on my straight walk, to prove to Isla she’s walking crooked.

Making our way around the block to the neighboring street, we’re finally heading north, but not on my street, the rooster street.  We bypass the corner where the white dog was standing.  Another block up, I turn us left, back onto Chama, heading towards home.  I am tired.  I whine to Isla about her slanting gait that trips me.  Isla is frustrated.  She whines at each moving shadow/possible scruffy dog.  We’re dragging at the invisible weight of our combined complaining.  Our wills are like diesel trucks, one hitched to the other, noisy, heavy, hauling their big load.

I’m positive the white dog has moved on to another street, but no, there he is, on the same corner.  He is staring at us, as if he’s known all along we’d eventually come from the other direction.  So I reverse our steps, backtrack onto the neighboring street from where we’ve just turned.

Only, the white dog has made the same parallel move from his corner.  He’s now waiting for us on the corner of the neighboring street.  ”Shit,” I say.  What else can I say?  This is shit–it’s shitty.  This feels like after-school bullies, like a Western duel, and I’ve forgotten my weapon.  Thankfully, Isla still has not mastered looking straight ahead, is trying to stare through a wood fence, has not noticed the white dog.

I’m out of ideas, and my desire to be home and free of my leash grip has tripled–it has an ache at the tail of it.  There is nothing else for me to do but move forward.  I tell Isla this.  No matter what, move forward.

Eventually, naturally, inevitably, Isla sees the white dog.  Not only this, she sees that his stare has been laying on top of her like a net about to be drawn tight.  She starts to flap like a caught fish.  We approach him at the corner, and I cut across the corner lot’s front lawn, having learned from dogs that even a few feet of distance is sometimes enough not to cross the invisible boundary onto the other’s turf.  Only there is no invisible boundary with lost, confused dogs.  The white dog comes after us, quickly, purposefully.  Isla is trying to flip herself around under my iron grip.  Her barking chip is about ten seconds from short-circuiting.  That’s it.  I stop walking.  I turn around, my hand out like a crossing guard.  This is what I say:  Stop.  Go back.  Go home, or away, or wherever you can.  I don’t know what Isla is doing–I am looking at the white dog, thinking, wishing, saying, Stop.  He stops.  Jerks back.  Turns and retreats, all in one motion, all by some invisible force that has come off of my hand.

*

The afternoon sun has warmed things up.  There is no more white ghost dog on the corner; in fact, all of the morning’s shadows are gone, replaced by the trees’ long, tingly ones.  There are trucks newly parked along the curb, and Isla and I walk around them, further into the street, heading north on Chama.  Two blocks up we see him–the black rooster–crossing the street with a young, golden, red-capped protege to his side.  They are quiet in whatever their mission is; the silence I know is by intention, from having heard the crowing at every hour of the morning and afternoon.

My heart nearly stops twice on our way north:  once, as a scruffy dog comes bounding out of its shadows and runs the length of the chain-link fence, its fur running through the fence holes like cheese through a grater.  The other, when a black and white pit bull comes out of nowhere–I am starting to believe the dogs in this neighborhood dematerialize through fences–and is suddenly at Isla’s back legs, sniffing her.

Isla badly wants to bark at the scruffy dog.  I hear her throat winding up; I soothe her with loose, low noises.  She throws her weight toward the fence and I pull back, the leash taut enough for a unicyclist to perform tricks.  In Isla’s mind she’s fighting the dog, fighting the urge to bark (from my constant request), fighting me for challenging and counter-acting her surges.  In this moment, she’s with nobody.  She wants to be empty, an echo, gone.  I don’t know why.  I am hating history for what it veils from me:  two years of her life I will never know.  I hate that facts do not matter when I don’t have them; I hate that pulling her alongside me is all there is.

In the second near-heart-stopping moment, I am too focused on detaching Isla from the velcro of the pit bull’s nose to her back fur and making it across the invisible border of his domain to remember his stigma.  I don’t have the energy to believe he is a vicious attacker right now.  It isn’t about attacking.  It’s about the invisible line.  I guess we eventually make it there.  As fast as he has appeared, the pit bull’s body, his threat, shrink back–vanish–to wherever it was they came from.

*

Chihuahuas seem to be the best fence-dematerializers in the neighborhood.  I imagine them melting like a stick of butter, oozing out, then re-hardening on the other side.  From the intersections we cross I have already seen two chihuahuas scurrying down parallel streets to ours, patrolling the perimeters of their concrete estates.  It all seems an illusion.  The fences, the gates, Isla’s leash, the dogs’ property lines.  My ownership over Isla, who I keep instructing.  I don’t believe any of it.  My shadow towers over Isla’s small, bobbing one.  I don’t believe this, either.

I don’t believe in Isla’s short-circuited chip; she hasn’t barked once, not even at the scruffy dog.  She’s moving, though diagonally, forward.  I don’t believe that this neighborhood is one thing or another–it is vanishing as we walk.  Strains of cars and voices are part of the breeze, just like the sunlight, the trees of black birds.