ESA
by Rosalind Margulies
I inherited from my mother a proclivity for living slightly beyond my means and from my father an intense anxiety about doing so, which normally just meant I would buy the imported cheese from the grocery store instead of the generic stuff and spend the rest of the evening feeling bad about it but that day meant I came home with a sixteen-week-old rescue puppy. It was slightly less of an impulse purchase than the Puglian burrata moldering in the back of my fridge had been; I’d spent the past few weeks researching the benefits of having a dog in the house. Owning a pet, WebMD told me, ranked somewhere above SSRIs and slightly below Ketamine infusions at alleviating the symptoms of depression, and my health insurance had twice declined to cover Ketamine infusions.
“He was rescued from a puppy mill,” an ASPCA employee wearing too much lipliner tells me of the little beige dog that sits at the back of the furthest cage in the kennel. “Last of the litter; his sister got adopted this morning.”
I peer into the cage and meet his solemn gaze. Last picked; I think of dodgeball day in middle-school gym class, of waiting in vain for one of the captains to call my name. My reputation as a weak catcher and an even weaker social asset would invariably lead me to whatever team process of elimination ordained.
I charge the $300 adoption fee to my debit card and name the dog Bodie on the drive home.
Bodie’s Petfinder profile describes him as a short-coated lab/shepherd mix with a mellow personality and estimates he’ll reach 60 pounds by the time he’s full grown. Lipliner lady gives me a cardboard box lined with the towel he and his siblings had slept on to take him home in, to help keep him calm during the car ride. I carry the box over the threshold of my apartment and set it on the faux-wood flooring. Bodie climbs out and looks around at the space: at the cracked leather couch I’d found on Facebook Marketplace, at the Trader Joe’s flowers wilting in the Guinness beer glass, at the thin layer of grease spackling the range hood above the stove.
He looks at me.
I bring up my concerns to the vet a few days later when I take Bodie in for his puppy shots.
“He’s a little… standoffish,” I tell the vet as he pushes a needle of parvo vaccine into Bodie’s right haunch. “He doesn’t seem to really like being pet and he never wants to cuddle.”
The vet frowns. “Is he eating? Drinking water?” I tell him yes. He shrugs. “Maybe he just needs time to settle in. It’s a big adjustment, going from a kennel to a house.” On the ride home, Bodie curls up in the back seat and doesn’t look at me once.
My friends love him. “Oh, he’s such a sweetie,” Eliza coos, dragging Bodie into her lap. “Oh, baby baby baby.” She scratches him behind the ears, and I try to look pleased when he wags his tail—half-heartedly to be sure, but nonetheless a gesture he’s yet to show me. “Is he a snuggler?” Eliza asks me.
I shrug. “He definitely likes his own space,” I say, which is putting it mildly. Bodie cringes when I try to touch him and I can count on two hands the number of times we’ve been in the same room for more than ten minutes, one if only the times he’s been awake.
“He’ll get there,” says Eliza, lifting him by the underneath of his front legs exactly the way all the puppy books say not to do. He stares at her. “Baby baby puppy.”
The internet isn’t of any help. A few Google searches lead me to a condition called Reactive Attachment Disorder, a rare but serious mental illness in which children, usually adoptees, do not form emotional bonds with their caregivers. WebMD tells me that symptoms include avoidance of physical touch (check), a disinterest in interaction with the caregiver (check), a lack of outwardly expressed emotions (check), and low self-esteem (can’t rule it out). I’m just about ready to diagnose Bodie and start searching for therapists until I remember he is a dog, not a human child. A Google search for reactive attachment disorder dogs reveals only a study on the effectiveness of pet adoption on RAD (inconclusive) and multiple articles about curing separation anxiety in dogs (the exact opposite of the problem I have).
Another Google search for dog autism reveals similarly lackluster results.
Bodie is six months old when I call the dog trainer.
“I don’t think my dog likes me very much,” I tell her over the phone.
“Okay,” says the trainer. “Is he aggressive?”
“No.”
“Not at all? He doesn’t growl or lunge or give you hard stares or anything like that?”
“He doesn’t lunge or growl but I don’t know what a hard stare is.”
“Well, it’s when a dog kind of freezes in place and stares at you in a very menacing way. It’s how they let you know they need space.”
I glance over at Bodie, who’s lying in his bed. He does, indeed, have his eyes locked on me. But there’s no particular malice in his gaze; instead, I feel as if he’s caught me doing something I’m not supposed to. A chill rises like a surfacing ice floe in the pit of my stomach.
“Not exactly,” I tell the trainer. “He stares, but it isn’t aggressive.” I swallow. “It’s more like… well, I feel like he’s judging me, almost.”
The trainer laughs. “You sure he isn’t a cat?”
I force a laugh and agree to pay her $75 for an hour-long training session.
Bodie is a fast learner; sit, stay, speak, come here, roll over. The trainer tells me I have nothing to worry about. “Some dogs just aren’t all that affectionate,” she says as I write her check. “Just like people. As long as he doesn’t show any signs of aggression or resource guarding, I wouldn’t worry.”
“Sure,” I say, and draw a smiley face next to my signature even though I don’t mean it.
When Bodie is eight months old, I decide that maybe the problem is he isn’t getting enough dog time; aside from butt-sniffs on walks and occasional trips to the dog park, most of his interactions are with people. I pull an all-nighter researching doggy daycares and settle on the Canine Chateau, whose website describes it as a “boutique communal pet-minding service.” It’s a half-hour drive from my apartment and $70 per day, not including field trip and spa fees, but, I remind myself as I type in my security code, Bodie deserves the best. He comes back from his first day with Swarovski crystals glued to his toenails.
After a week, Headmaster Carrington, the ostentatiously WASP-ish owner of the Canine Chateau, pulls me aside when I come to pick up Bodie and politely but firmly requests I not bring him back.
“I don’t think Bodie quite understands our culture,” she explains to me; I notice the gems on her fake nails match Bodie’s exactly. “We strive to create an atmosphere of gaiety and rejuvenation for our canine customers, and Bodie seems to have no interest in furthering the cultivation of that energy.”
“You’re kicking him out because he has bad vibes?” I ask her incredulously.
Carrington nods. “Like arsenic,” she says. A chandelier with crystal prisms shaped like little dog bones hangs high above us.
So Bodie spends his days with me in my apartment. I work from my laptop as a Brand Research Manager at a Value Creation firm headquartered two states over. It’s a low-paying but easy job that gives me plenty of time to indulge in my new favorite activity: eating progressively larger quantities of mushrooms and trying to figure out where I’ve gone wrong with Bodie.
One Wednesday while incorrectly filling out a spreadsheet, I come to the conclusion that the issue is that Bodie was a puppy mill dog, the fruit of humanity’s most venal impulses; a living, feeling creature bred to be bought and sold as a product. And I was complicit in that collective hubris by my choice to rescue him. Rescue! How presumptuous the very word! I thought of the self-satisfaction I had felt on the way home from the shelter, the way I had craned to marvel at my new acquisition in his cardboard-box prison at red lights and stop signs, the nauseating pleasure I had indulged in because I had adopted, not shopped. Rescue! I had not pulled him from a burning building or snatched him from the jaws of a lion or even removed him from the puppy mill myself. What had I done to feel such pride in my actions? Bodie, I was sure, had sensed this ill-informed arrogance in his new owner and become immediately repulsed by me.
I lurk at my window for hours on end, watching the denizens of my neighborhood saunter through the park across the street, toting their beloved freaks of nature at the end of technicolor leashes. Murderers, all of them. How many unwanted dogs were killed each day in “shelters” across the United States, whipping boys for the manifested desires of suburban families and over-earning-20-something-year-olds ever in pursuit of dogs engineered to be smaller, doodlier, more brachycephalic? I research dog breeding standards and what I find disgusts me. Did you know that English bulldogs have been bred to have such large skulls that many can only give birth via C-section? Did you know that Cavalier King Charles spaniels are, conversely, bred to have such tiny heads that nearly 70% of them develop neurological diseases by the age of five as their skulls are simply too small for their brains? Did you know that the tightly curled tails of pugs frequently lead to spina bifida, the long backs of dachshunds to excruciatingly painful degenerative disc disease?
One morning during my vigil, I spot Shota Campbell, a 6’2” heart-breakingly handsome former schoolmate of mine who was supposedly single-handedly responsible for the Chlamydia outbreak that tormented Roosevelt High for three straight years, walking a German shepherd (a breed whose sloped backs frequently lead to hip dysplasia and gastric torsion). I pause my surveillance for a moment to duck under the windowsill and pray he didn’t see me. Bodie’s eyes burn holes in the back of my head; you could stick your fingers in my skull and roll it like a bowling ball.
When he is ten months old, dog-fluencers infesting my TikTok For You page inspire me to start raw-feeding Bodie. Whole foods, they insist, lead to happier, healthier, more intellectually-stimulated canine companions. I spend hours assembling complicated, nutrient-dense meals for Bodie. Goat hearts for iron; pumpkin puree for fiber; frozen blueberries for antioxidants; canned salmon for omega-3s; plain kefir for smooth digestion; chicken feet to scrape tartar from his teeth; and a dehydrated quail chick for a treat. He only eats the quail chick and the goat hearts and I have ramen noodles for dinner for a week straight until I see another TikTok that tells me raw-feeding can give dogs salmonella.
After work, I go to Petco for a new bag of food. The pretty cashier with long dark hair asks me how my day is going and I explain to her that a lot of people think loving is just liking intensified, but they’re wrong. I tell her that liking is wanting and loving is needing. I tell her that’s what’s wrong with religion today; the faithful love God, but they don’t like him. To them He is a means of survival. To like God, I tell her, would be much more meaningful than to love him, because there is no impetus behind liking; it is unreciprocal and given freely in a way love cannot be. I tell her that in this way, humans are like gods to dogs, loved for what they provide, but not liked. I tell her that following this logic, I believe my dog is an atheist, because he neither likes or loves me. The cashier says wow! She asks if she can give Bodie a treat and I say okay, then I pay her $60 for a 15-pound bag of gourmet dog food.
That night I dream of the Petco cashier. I dream she is beneath me, naked, the bones of her hips pressed against mine. My hands cup her face; her dark hair is splayed over my pillow like spread fingers.
The weekend comes and with it an invitation from Eliza asking if I’d like to join her and some friends for drinks at a local bar; I tell her fuck it, why not. I put on a tight dress and a half inch of makeup and don’t even look at Bodie on my way out the door.
Someone orders shots; I drink two. A man I have no interest in sleeping with buys me a drink; I accept it. I tell three separate women how beautiful they are.
“I heard you got a new dog?” Eliza’s friend Kim asks me, and I say no.
And then he is here. “Eliza!” says Shota, slinging an arm around her shoulder. He greets Kim, then turns to me. “And I don’t think we’ve met.”
I tell him my name. “We went to Roosevelt together,” I say. “We had Algebra 2. With Mr. Thatcher?”
“Really?” says Shota. He gives me that good-natured, PG-rated smile that makes you wonder how he hasn’t been cast in a Disney Channel original movie yet. “I don’t remember that.”
He puts his hand on the small of my back.
Later on, we dance together, his hands on my hips, pulling me close to him, the two of us moving in sync to the heartbeat of the bass. I slide my hands under his shirt and feel his torso, softer than I expected but solid, too. I close my eyes and am enamored by my own inanity; for once I feel beautiful. He kisses me; I feel his teeth against my lips, feel them drag along my neck. I tell him my apartment is right around the corner and ask if he wants to come over for a nightcap. He says yes.
“I love dogs,” says Shota when he sees Bodie, who does not acknowledge him. “I have a German shepherd.”
In the darkness, reality becomes fluid and Shota transforms into every lover who has shared my bed and some who haven’t. My high school boyfriend, who played trombone in the marching band and made creative use of his teeth when eating me out; the beautiful art major I had a crush on in college who made me cum four times in fifteen minutes then spent the rest of the night crying about his ex-girlfriend; the older Italian man who picked me up at a bar during my study abroad and railed me on the midnight sands of the Amalfi coast; Spike from Buffy; the PetCo cashier. Shota shudders above me and I feel the shock of it ripple through my body. He comes and I begin to cry.
Afterwards, Shota is kind. He brings me a towel and holds me and doesn’t ask what’s wrong. When I’ve calmed down, he tells me he’s been invited to a party uptown and asks if I want to come with him; I can tell he’s relieved when I say no. He kisses me goodbye and leaves and I know I will not see him again. I am naked, seated on my bed, wrapped in my cum-spotted, seashell-patterned bath towel. From across the room, I notice Bodie, curled up in his bed, luminous eyes fixed on me. I stare back at him for what feels like a solid minute, then go to sleep without letting him outside and in the morning there is pee on the floor.
Two weeks later I am diagnosed with Chlamydia.
When Bodie is a year old, I take him for a walk in the park. It is a beautiful, sunny Sunday, and all around me there are people: pushing children in strollers, tossing frisbees back and forth, trying to act like they aren’t high, fruitlessly attempting to cure hangovers with everything bagel-egg sandwiches. Bodie walks at my side, eyes fixed on the sidewalk.
I had tried to buy love. I had adopted a dog with the expectation that it would love me and demonstrate that love in certain ways, to kiss my face, to sleep in my bed, to wag its tail, to roll over and present its belly. I think of a Channel 2 exposé I’d watched some months before. A team of reporters had partnered with the Bangladeshi Police Bureau of Investigation to conduct a sting operation in which they uncovered a child sex slavery ring running out of a Dhaka hotel. A hidden camera sewn into the shirt of a reporter revealed how one of the girls, who had been deemed a flight risk, was handcuffed to a radiator each night so she couldn’t run away.
I walk further, and then further again. When we are out of sight of anyone but a few squirrels, I kneel. I am close to Bodie, closer than he would usually allow me to be, and I feel his warm, damp breath on my neck. I unhook his leash from his collar, and sit back on my heels. For a few seconds, nothing happens; he looks at me, and I look at him, each of us waiting for the other to do something. Then I clip his leash back on and we walk home.
“He was rescued from a puppy mill,” an ASPCA employee wearing too much lipliner tells me of the little beige dog that sits at the back of the furthest cage in the kennel. “Last of the litter; his sister got adopted this morning.”
I peer into the cage and meet his solemn gaze. Last picked; I think of dodgeball day in middle-school gym class, of waiting in vain for one of the captains to call my name. My reputation as a weak catcher and an even weaker social asset would invariably lead me to whatever team process of elimination ordained.
I charge the $300 adoption fee to my debit card and name the dog Bodie on the drive home.
Bodie’s Petfinder profile describes him as a short-coated lab/shepherd mix with a mellow personality and estimates he’ll reach 60 pounds by the time he’s full grown. Lipliner lady gives me a cardboard box lined with the towel he and his siblings had slept on to take him home in, to help keep him calm during the car ride. I carry the box over the threshold of my apartment and set it on the faux-wood flooring. Bodie climbs out and looks around at the space: at the cracked leather couch I’d found on Facebook Marketplace, at the Trader Joe’s flowers wilting in the Guinness beer glass, at the thin layer of grease spackling the range hood above the stove.
He looks at me.
I bring up my concerns to the vet a few days later when I take Bodie in for his puppy shots.
“He’s a little… standoffish,” I tell the vet as he pushes a needle of parvo vaccine into Bodie’s right haunch. “He doesn’t seem to really like being pet and he never wants to cuddle.”
The vet frowns. “Is he eating? Drinking water?” I tell him yes. He shrugs. “Maybe he just needs time to settle in. It’s a big adjustment, going from a kennel to a house.” On the ride home, Bodie curls up in the back seat and doesn’t look at me once.
My friends love him. “Oh, he’s such a sweetie,” Eliza coos, dragging Bodie into her lap. “Oh, baby baby baby.” She scratches him behind the ears, and I try to look pleased when he wags his tail—half-heartedly to be sure, but nonetheless a gesture he’s yet to show me. “Is he a snuggler?” Eliza asks me.
I shrug. “He definitely likes his own space,” I say, which is putting it mildly. Bodie cringes when I try to touch him and I can count on two hands the number of times we’ve been in the same room for more than ten minutes, one if only the times he’s been awake.
“He’ll get there,” says Eliza, lifting him by the underneath of his front legs exactly the way all the puppy books say not to do. He stares at her. “Baby baby puppy.”
The internet isn’t of any help. A few Google searches lead me to a condition called Reactive Attachment Disorder, a rare but serious mental illness in which children, usually adoptees, do not form emotional bonds with their caregivers. WebMD tells me that symptoms include avoidance of physical touch (check), a disinterest in interaction with the caregiver (check), a lack of outwardly expressed emotions (check), and low self-esteem (can’t rule it out). I’m just about ready to diagnose Bodie and start searching for therapists until I remember he is a dog, not a human child. A Google search for reactive attachment disorder dogs reveals only a study on the effectiveness of pet adoption on RAD (inconclusive) and multiple articles about curing separation anxiety in dogs (the exact opposite of the problem I have).
Another Google search for dog autism reveals similarly lackluster results.
Bodie is six months old when I call the dog trainer.
“I don’t think my dog likes me very much,” I tell her over the phone.
“Okay,” says the trainer. “Is he aggressive?”
“No.”
“Not at all? He doesn’t growl or lunge or give you hard stares or anything like that?”
“He doesn’t lunge or growl but I don’t know what a hard stare is.”
“Well, it’s when a dog kind of freezes in place and stares at you in a very menacing way. It’s how they let you know they need space.”
I glance over at Bodie, who’s lying in his bed. He does, indeed, have his eyes locked on me. But there’s no particular malice in his gaze; instead, I feel as if he’s caught me doing something I’m not supposed to. A chill rises like a surfacing ice floe in the pit of my stomach.
“Not exactly,” I tell the trainer. “He stares, but it isn’t aggressive.” I swallow. “It’s more like… well, I feel like he’s judging me, almost.”
The trainer laughs. “You sure he isn’t a cat?”
I force a laugh and agree to pay her $75 for an hour-long training session.
Bodie is a fast learner; sit, stay, speak, come here, roll over. The trainer tells me I have nothing to worry about. “Some dogs just aren’t all that affectionate,” she says as I write her check. “Just like people. As long as he doesn’t show any signs of aggression or resource guarding, I wouldn’t worry.”
“Sure,” I say, and draw a smiley face next to my signature even though I don’t mean it.
When Bodie is eight months old, I decide that maybe the problem is he isn’t getting enough dog time; aside from butt-sniffs on walks and occasional trips to the dog park, most of his interactions are with people. I pull an all-nighter researching doggy daycares and settle on the Canine Chateau, whose website describes it as a “boutique communal pet-minding service.” It’s a half-hour drive from my apartment and $70 per day, not including field trip and spa fees, but, I remind myself as I type in my security code, Bodie deserves the best. He comes back from his first day with Swarovski crystals glued to his toenails.
After a week, Headmaster Carrington, the ostentatiously WASP-ish owner of the Canine Chateau, pulls me aside when I come to pick up Bodie and politely but firmly requests I not bring him back.
“I don’t think Bodie quite understands our culture,” she explains to me; I notice the gems on her fake nails match Bodie’s exactly. “We strive to create an atmosphere of gaiety and rejuvenation for our canine customers, and Bodie seems to have no interest in furthering the cultivation of that energy.”
“You’re kicking him out because he has bad vibes?” I ask her incredulously.
Carrington nods. “Like arsenic,” she says. A chandelier with crystal prisms shaped like little dog bones hangs high above us.
So Bodie spends his days with me in my apartment. I work from my laptop as a Brand Research Manager at a Value Creation firm headquartered two states over. It’s a low-paying but easy job that gives me plenty of time to indulge in my new favorite activity: eating progressively larger quantities of mushrooms and trying to figure out where I’ve gone wrong with Bodie.
One Wednesday while incorrectly filling out a spreadsheet, I come to the conclusion that the issue is that Bodie was a puppy mill dog, the fruit of humanity’s most venal impulses; a living, feeling creature bred to be bought and sold as a product. And I was complicit in that collective hubris by my choice to rescue him. Rescue! How presumptuous the very word! I thought of the self-satisfaction I had felt on the way home from the shelter, the way I had craned to marvel at my new acquisition in his cardboard-box prison at red lights and stop signs, the nauseating pleasure I had indulged in because I had adopted, not shopped. Rescue! I had not pulled him from a burning building or snatched him from the jaws of a lion or even removed him from the puppy mill myself. What had I done to feel such pride in my actions? Bodie, I was sure, had sensed this ill-informed arrogance in his new owner and become immediately repulsed by me.
I lurk at my window for hours on end, watching the denizens of my neighborhood saunter through the park across the street, toting their beloved freaks of nature at the end of technicolor leashes. Murderers, all of them. How many unwanted dogs were killed each day in “shelters” across the United States, whipping boys for the manifested desires of suburban families and over-earning-20-something-year-olds ever in pursuit of dogs engineered to be smaller, doodlier, more brachycephalic? I research dog breeding standards and what I find disgusts me. Did you know that English bulldogs have been bred to have such large skulls that many can only give birth via C-section? Did you know that Cavalier King Charles spaniels are, conversely, bred to have such tiny heads that nearly 70% of them develop neurological diseases by the age of five as their skulls are simply too small for their brains? Did you know that the tightly curled tails of pugs frequently lead to spina bifida, the long backs of dachshunds to excruciatingly painful degenerative disc disease?
One morning during my vigil, I spot Shota Campbell, a 6’2” heart-breakingly handsome former schoolmate of mine who was supposedly single-handedly responsible for the Chlamydia outbreak that tormented Roosevelt High for three straight years, walking a German shepherd (a breed whose sloped backs frequently lead to hip dysplasia and gastric torsion). I pause my surveillance for a moment to duck under the windowsill and pray he didn’t see me. Bodie’s eyes burn holes in the back of my head; you could stick your fingers in my skull and roll it like a bowling ball.
When he is ten months old, dog-fluencers infesting my TikTok For You page inspire me to start raw-feeding Bodie. Whole foods, they insist, lead to happier, healthier, more intellectually-stimulated canine companions. I spend hours assembling complicated, nutrient-dense meals for Bodie. Goat hearts for iron; pumpkin puree for fiber; frozen blueberries for antioxidants; canned salmon for omega-3s; plain kefir for smooth digestion; chicken feet to scrape tartar from his teeth; and a dehydrated quail chick for a treat. He only eats the quail chick and the goat hearts and I have ramen noodles for dinner for a week straight until I see another TikTok that tells me raw-feeding can give dogs salmonella.
After work, I go to Petco for a new bag of food. The pretty cashier with long dark hair asks me how my day is going and I explain to her that a lot of people think loving is just liking intensified, but they’re wrong. I tell her that liking is wanting and loving is needing. I tell her that’s what’s wrong with religion today; the faithful love God, but they don’t like him. To them He is a means of survival. To like God, I tell her, would be much more meaningful than to love him, because there is no impetus behind liking; it is unreciprocal and given freely in a way love cannot be. I tell her that in this way, humans are like gods to dogs, loved for what they provide, but not liked. I tell her that following this logic, I believe my dog is an atheist, because he neither likes or loves me. The cashier says wow! She asks if she can give Bodie a treat and I say okay, then I pay her $60 for a 15-pound bag of gourmet dog food.
That night I dream of the Petco cashier. I dream she is beneath me, naked, the bones of her hips pressed against mine. My hands cup her face; her dark hair is splayed over my pillow like spread fingers.
The weekend comes and with it an invitation from Eliza asking if I’d like to join her and some friends for drinks at a local bar; I tell her fuck it, why not. I put on a tight dress and a half inch of makeup and don’t even look at Bodie on my way out the door.
Someone orders shots; I drink two. A man I have no interest in sleeping with buys me a drink; I accept it. I tell three separate women how beautiful they are.
“I heard you got a new dog?” Eliza’s friend Kim asks me, and I say no.
And then he is here. “Eliza!” says Shota, slinging an arm around her shoulder. He greets Kim, then turns to me. “And I don’t think we’ve met.”
I tell him my name. “We went to Roosevelt together,” I say. “We had Algebra 2. With Mr. Thatcher?”
“Really?” says Shota. He gives me that good-natured, PG-rated smile that makes you wonder how he hasn’t been cast in a Disney Channel original movie yet. “I don’t remember that.”
He puts his hand on the small of my back.
Later on, we dance together, his hands on my hips, pulling me close to him, the two of us moving in sync to the heartbeat of the bass. I slide my hands under his shirt and feel his torso, softer than I expected but solid, too. I close my eyes and am enamored by my own inanity; for once I feel beautiful. He kisses me; I feel his teeth against my lips, feel them drag along my neck. I tell him my apartment is right around the corner and ask if he wants to come over for a nightcap. He says yes.
“I love dogs,” says Shota when he sees Bodie, who does not acknowledge him. “I have a German shepherd.”
In the darkness, reality becomes fluid and Shota transforms into every lover who has shared my bed and some who haven’t. My high school boyfriend, who played trombone in the marching band and made creative use of his teeth when eating me out; the beautiful art major I had a crush on in college who made me cum four times in fifteen minutes then spent the rest of the night crying about his ex-girlfriend; the older Italian man who picked me up at a bar during my study abroad and railed me on the midnight sands of the Amalfi coast; Spike from Buffy; the PetCo cashier. Shota shudders above me and I feel the shock of it ripple through my body. He comes and I begin to cry.
Afterwards, Shota is kind. He brings me a towel and holds me and doesn’t ask what’s wrong. When I’ve calmed down, he tells me he’s been invited to a party uptown and asks if I want to come with him; I can tell he’s relieved when I say no. He kisses me goodbye and leaves and I know I will not see him again. I am naked, seated on my bed, wrapped in my cum-spotted, seashell-patterned bath towel. From across the room, I notice Bodie, curled up in his bed, luminous eyes fixed on me. I stare back at him for what feels like a solid minute, then go to sleep without letting him outside and in the morning there is pee on the floor.
Two weeks later I am diagnosed with Chlamydia.
When Bodie is a year old, I take him for a walk in the park. It is a beautiful, sunny Sunday, and all around me there are people: pushing children in strollers, tossing frisbees back and forth, trying to act like they aren’t high, fruitlessly attempting to cure hangovers with everything bagel-egg sandwiches. Bodie walks at my side, eyes fixed on the sidewalk.
I had tried to buy love. I had adopted a dog with the expectation that it would love me and demonstrate that love in certain ways, to kiss my face, to sleep in my bed, to wag its tail, to roll over and present its belly. I think of a Channel 2 exposé I’d watched some months before. A team of reporters had partnered with the Bangladeshi Police Bureau of Investigation to conduct a sting operation in which they uncovered a child sex slavery ring running out of a Dhaka hotel. A hidden camera sewn into the shirt of a reporter revealed how one of the girls, who had been deemed a flight risk, was handcuffed to a radiator each night so she couldn’t run away.
I walk further, and then further again. When we are out of sight of anyone but a few squirrels, I kneel. I am close to Bodie, closer than he would usually allow me to be, and I feel his warm, damp breath on my neck. I unhook his leash from his collar, and sit back on my heels. For a few seconds, nothing happens; he looks at me, and I look at him, each of us waiting for the other to do something. Then I clip his leash back on and we walk home.