THE PAST OR THE FUTURE

The dog's dug another hole and squeezed under the fence again to leave me, naked, calling her name from the back porch and trying not to spill my coffee (hot, hot) and squinting into the dark yard, dazed, as I poke with my tongue the tender spot in my mouth where the bubbling mozzarella from the bad pizza burned me, and then you kissed it better.
     Out there belongs to the dog: tea towels she dragged from the kitchen, the chewed-off heel of a dead pair of pumps, that shitty plastic bucket she carries around like it's prey, the bones buried to thwart thieves. Still, she's all about escape.
     The dog sat on her ass and stared at the bed and whined, so I rose from you, shiny with you, and let her out.
     The dog loves you more than she loves me, which she and I understand, and she's never had sex, for which I have meant to apologize, because it's sad for an animal.
     The past is a good dog. Or the future. Or the future is a bad dog.
     The dog's favorite bad dog game is to jump on the laundry I hang on the line, splatting her muddy paws on it, growling with glee, wrestling my hard work to death.
     It's creepy, I know, but I'm slowly trading places with the dog. Escape, I think.
     Okay, so once there was a planet owned and run by dogs, and I lived there in a fenced yard, and I could run really fast but I had no thumbs, and nothing to hold onto without thumbs. Four legs are fun, but being trapped is not.
      Bad dog.

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THAT ITALY THING

Jessica Ann Engels believes that believing in Italy gives her feeling, and feeling is like music, and music is like love—and this from a person, Jessica Ann Engels, who definitely hates opera, even though she's tried. But look at all of the feelings in those Italian words that have to do with music, how the lettuce left too long in the vegetable drawer changes, pianissimo. How the bugs do their thing, inquietante.
     The mailboxes look bored to Jessica Ann Engels. The crows act so important. The sparrow's little life is huge to the sparrow.
     Maybe she's wrong to see a thing like a bird and want to feel what it feels, but it's part of her Italy thing. Take the groundhog who lives underneath Ann Marie's shed, the way he stands up and looks around and chews, like an Italian businessman with a panino. He's not a businessman, but it's funny to think of him like that.
     Another belief: Jessica Ann Engels believes that Nature makes its importance known through human consciousness. And if that consciousness has a touch of the Italian, even better. And if she has come across a word in Italian—because she's studying the language at the Center—that describes precisely what's so important about feelings, better still. Even though too many words, in any language, suck the souls of things.
     Jessica Ann Engels believes in real life too: the honesty of lists of ingredients, the magic of antibacterial wipes, her grandmother Abigail's ghost, singing to plants, regular checkups, justice, and the importance of being a paralegal. And since she even likes herself, and her real life, it's not like she's crazy, or the Italy thing means she's missing something. True, the headlines keep getting bigger—Jessica Wins! Jessica Shouldn't Have Eaten That, Jessica Forgot, Jessica in Love, Jessica Not in Love, Don't Go to Nashville!—but she's complicated, as her mom used to say, which was an insult.
     Researching precedents in the Lacks v. Marcus case, pausing to open her browser and check her cart—she probably doesn't need all three of those tops—and then toggling to the case again, Jessica Ann Engels realizes it's later than she thought. She peeks around the corner of her cubicle: everybody's gone. They've all gone to Italy without her. The thought makes her smile/sad.
     Because it isn't really Italy—Jessica knows that. It's something else. It's in the mirror.
     In Italy, at the end of the day, she would slip off her work heels under her desk, sneakers on, arrividerci. And to the long slide through the rest of the evening, ciao.

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I was on a bus, and there was a groundhog in the grass as we rolled past, and I thought that the little funny beast looked like an Italian businessman—and that was the start of "That Italy Thing." Which is how I like to work, to associate, and then to follow through on the logic of a premise that may well be illogical.

"The Past or the Future" began as a bad poem. During the pandemic, especially at the outset, I found writing new work too hard, so I went back into my files and began to cannibalize long ago failures. The resulting language retains some of the lyricism of the original, but truly, most of that early disaster has been excised. Yay for hard-drives.

Both stories here engage the inner lives and imaginations of their protagonists. Perhaps these forays are also related to the alone-ness of the pandemic? I do feel that I've been turned inside, in new ways, by all that isolation. And both stories are from a forthcoming collection currently entitled People Everywhere Are Having Sex.