“Signs of Life” by Kira Homsher

These days, my main source of worth is found in asking my companion, Bryce, if he would like some tea and then, after he says yes-please, making it for him, careful not to forget the honey. This is one of many things we do not have in common: he likes everything sweet, while I prefer my tea bitter and my meals salty. And yet, somehow, it’s always me with the bloody gums and cavities in need of filling.

      The dog, too, helps steer me through the sludge of each day. Mary Ruefle was correct in observing that a pet is a clock. Satisfying Gus’s wants gives me a foothold in the dragging, isolated hours. Each morning, he must be taken out to piss and shit. His silver bowls must be filled with kibble and fresh tap water and his hind legs must be scratched. The velvety crown of his head begs kissing. The day takes on a heightened quality when we go out of our way to surprise him with a walk in the snow, a peanut butter Kong, or an extra round of fetchball. He’s patient, in his way, for a creature so muscular and energetic. He could happily spend hours hiking, swimming, or hunting, but instead keeps us company on the bed or by the TV, which makes us feel inclined to reward him. In living with us, he forgoes his true nature to accommodate ours, and he does so with clear, easy love.

      Gus is a gorgeous mutt: half German shepherd and half Chesapeake Bay Retriever, with a handsome, alert face and a glowing red coat. We found him by searching ‘puppy’ on Craigslist shortly after moving to our small Virginia town, where I work both as a student and instructor of writing and Bryce as a manager at a small local movie theater. Gus quickly became the perpetual object of our wonder and joy, the focal point of our meandering lives. We’ve developed an intricate and embarrassing vocabulary for his many expressions, behaviors, and rituals. He has twenty different names and counting. We call him Honeybear when he isn’t wearing his collar, Rotmouth when he breathes in our faces, Booping Man when it’s time to play. Tinklepaw, Uncle Tooth, Buster Brown. Little Woof.  

      I often wonder what he thinks of us. That Bryce smells good and human, while my scent is buried under soap and chemicals? That we spend too much time staring at the noisy black box in the living room? That we don’t eat nearly enough hot dogs? 

      Outside our rural duplex, the world rages senselessly on. I set down mugs of tea on Bryce’s desk, where he tinkers with outdated electronic equipment, day after melting day. I bury my face in dogbelly and breathe in Gus’s smiley smell. I clean the mud off his paws. I drag a comb through his coat. I sweep clouds of red hair off the kitchen floor. I give in to this slow new life, absent of surprise. 

*

      Back home, my poor old parents’ bodies have turned against them. Dad can’t lift his right arm anymore. He gets daily migraines and has had so many back surgeries I’ve lost count. Mom has an intense, unlocatable pain that comes and goes according to its own logic, agony she describes—to anyone who will still listen—as acid burning, as betrayal, as knives. Neither one of them has been able to work for years. I’m their only child, and I live seven hours away. I can scarcely remember a time Dad wasn’t hurting and now, after sixty years of buoyancy, Mom has finally succumbed to gravity. She spends every day in bed, making frantic phone calls to a dwindling network of doctors and friends who have little to offer in the way of comfort or advice. I’ve had to ask her to stop calling me just to make me listen to her cry. 

      We used to be like two imps, she and I. Playful and wicked. Being my mother was her natural occupation. I was a late child, but she had an astounding reserve of energy for my youthful inclinations. We never had much money, but I hardly noticed. Mom would always come up with some new craft or game for us to partake in. We’d make ridiculous hats out of old rags and doilies, pop-up books with abstract drawings of the cats, drums out of laundry baskets. She was the only adult I knew who could convincingly play pretend. To her, life was funny and pliant. She showed me how to be awake to the world, alive to its humor. She was a dancer and a happy maniac, with teeth as big as her laughter and a full head of wavy red hair. I inherited neither the hair nor the joie de vivre.  

      Mom wants to show me a different side of life now, a side I don’t want to look at. I avoid her calls, clench my jaw, and retreat into the temporary ephemera of my hopeless adult life. 

*

      A few days after Christmas, I drive up to visit Mom and Dad in Philadelphia. I don’t come to indulge in the holiday spirit—I come to remind them of reasons to live, bearing poorly wrapped gifts and artificial merriment. On the first day, I wake to the sound of my mother’s sobs at six in the morning. I tug the pillow over my head. Her sobs grow louder. I put my earbuds in and play rain sounds until the simulated storm feels real enough for me to sleep again.

      In the afternoon, we sit on opposite couches, exchanging cheerless conversation. I watch as Mom’s feet rhythmically knead the air between us, calloused and cracked from years of dance. She waited until she was forty-one to become pregnant with me; she didn’t want to give up her life of tumbling and diving across dirty black stages. Maybe she shouldn’t have waited so long. 

      The years have not been kind. This pain has turned her into a smelly old doll. She doesn’t seem to wash her hair or leave the bed. Always, she wants to be held. My mother wraps my limbs around her body and becomes an object in my arms, something I am both too young and too old to hold on to. I’ll be twenty-five next month. What is the appropriate age for a daughter to become her mother’s keeper?

      Mom’s silvering roots need to be dyed red. She can’t bend over to clip her toenails. I try to make her feel beautiful—it’s all I can think to do. I pluck errant hairs from her chin and upper lip. I rub lotion into her dry cheeks. I tug a brush through her long red hair. I microwave her tea. I change the sheets, I vacuum, I dust. Really, I do all this to avoid having to speak. Mom says she doesn’t want me to remember her like this. I say I won’t. She asks me to say I know. I say I know, I know, I know. 

      She wants to talk about her pain. She tells me she’s had to ask several friends to drive her to the emergency room, though it’s never any use. The nurses assume she’s hooked on pain meds and dismiss her desperate pleas for relief. Dad won’t take me to the hospital anymore, she adds scornfully. I tell her about Gus, how he has a personality, his own sense of humor. No one can help me, she says. No one knows what to do. Another doctor has given up on her. I describe Gus’s in-between ears, how they are not quite floppy and not quite pointy. I tell her he hates to have his nails clipped. That he hates baths, but still gets in the tub when we ask him to. That’s nice, honey, she says. So nice, so sweet.

      Mom doesn’t want to learn from this and maybe there is nothing to learn. The body is a blunt instrument, often missing its own target. Pain was meant to be awkward—there is no room here for Zen or grace or celestial intervention, no interior fierceness to summon. The house sinks like sand beneath her. 

      I have no wisdom to offer. I watch her cry and fail to react, shame clouding my brain like a drug. I tell her things will change, as they always do—inevitably, hopefully. We just have to wait. There’s nothing else we can do. 

*

      Dad is always finding reasons to leave the house, so I don’t see as much of him during my visit. He goes out for coffee in the mornings and drives to the table tennis club most afternoons, where he plays competitively with his left arm, the one that still sort of works. He takes his time getting groceries. He goes on long motorcycle rides, which makes me worry he’ll get in another accident. We don’t have the money for accidents anymore.

      Sometimes we stay up to watch a movie or TV show after Mom’s gone to bed. We drink Yuenglings and talk about how impossible everything has become, how ugly and unrelenting Mom’s suffering is—how blameless. Her friends call less and less often, and she won’t talk to her siblings, who want only to hear the good news, the hopeful stuff, like if she’s found a compassionate specialist or promising new treatment. Mom’s run out of good news. She spent all her savings chasing a cure that does not seem to exist. Soon, we’ll be the only ones left to care for her, but our care has become flat and robotic. Our faces refuse to wear the expressions she’d have them display. She makes it so difficult, so thankless.

Bryce sends me a picture of Gus curled up in my spot on the bed. I hold my phone up to show Dad and he smiles, pauses the TV. Dogs are a lot of work, he says. They need so much looking after. 

      Dad tells me what he’d do if he won the lottery. There’s an old building up for sale in a neighboring town with brick walls and high ceilings. He’d buy it, he says, and open a combined shop for motorcycle parts and guitar repairs with a couple ping pong tables in the back for customers to enjoy. He could turn the upper floor into an apartment and live there, too. He doesn’t mention that this would involve leaving Mom and selling the house, but I can read between the lines. 

Rarely, the three of us share a moment that feels like home. Mom, Dad, and I sitting on our knees around the living room table, laughing at the same British comedy we’ve watched over and over again since I was in elementary school. Divvying up scrambled eggs. Wishing death on politicians. Three people who have shared a life, no matter how arbitrary and undignified it appears in the low evening light. It’s like catching a glimpse of myself in the window of some downtown shop, the electric current of familiarity: I am here. We are still here, somewhere under all this pain and lack, and we still need taking care. 

The week reaches its end. I head home, my guilt buckling itself in the passenger seat. It’s an icy day for driving and, halfway home, a truck fishtails off the highway and careens over into the brown roadside grass. I nurse the brakes as I pass the wreckage, watching for signs of life.   

*

  Mom calls a day or two after I get back, her voice cracking as she asks me about the drive, the weather in Virginia. I extend my legs in bed, brushing against the dog, who emits a low warning growl. I know she is waiting for me to ask how she is, but I don’t want to know. It snowed earlier, I tell her, but it’s melted now. Gus likes the snow. He gets so damp we have to dry him head to toe when he comes back inside. We wrap him up in towels like a furry little Roman. 

It’s bad, she says. It’s so bad. I don’t know how much longer—I don’t know. 

Gus looks up at me, the corner of his mouth drooping downwards, all floppy and rubbery like a deflated bike tire. I can hear the sounds of Bryce emptying the dishwasher downstairs. A car pulling in the driveway. Or maybe out.  

Are you there? Mom cries. Did you hear me? 

She is just a voice. I hold the phone away from my ear. Gus flops on his side and I reach down to scratch his exposed belly. His eyes are black as buttons, his nose a wet beating heart. 

Yes, I say. I hear you. 

*

      Someone’s dog has gone missing today. He runs right up to me and Bryce while we’re out for Gus’s evening walk. In truth, he runs right up to Gus and doesn’t pay us any mind. He has a collar but no leash. He’s a lean German shepherd with tall, pointy ears and markings the color of rust. It takes me a moment to realize that he isn’t supposed to be on his own—he’s loose. Gus snarls and snaps at him, pressing against my legs with his hackles up. A born alpha, he has a thing about unleashed dogs. 

      The next door neighbor approaches us with a pink leash in hand and the shepherd hurtles down the street, glancing back at us as he flees. He’s not mine, she explains, breathing hard. I’ve been following him for a few blocks, but he won’t let me near enough to grab him. 

      We offer to help, and she hands the leash to Bryce, asking that we leave it outside her front door when we’re finished. He jogs after the dog, whistling and cooing, while I steer Gus back in the direction of our duplex. I nudge him through the door, grab a bag of treats from the pantry, and dash to catch up with Bryce, who’s had no luck in the meantime. We chase the shepherd down the road, across an intersection, and past a church, where two children ride their bikes in the parking lot, shrieking with glee. The distance between us and the dog expands until he’s just a blurry, retreating shape on the horizon of the cold January sun. And then he’s gone. 

      It’s the third time this has happened in the past year or so. We stumble across a lost dog on the street but fail to react in time to return it to safety. There’s a kind of dazed pleasure in watching a dog follow its whims with no humans to steer or restrain it. For a moment, you don’t realize that something is wrong, that there’s something you can do. You just watch and smile as it passes by, racing to its happy doom. 

Featured art: Untitled by Coley Spencer

Kira K. Homsher is a writer from Philadelphia, currently pursuing an MFA at Virginia Tech. The winner of Phoebe Journal's 2020 nonfiction contest and a Pushcart nominee, her writing also appears or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Passages North, Barrelhouse, Hobart, and others. You can find her at kirahomsher.com and tweeting @bogcritter.

Coley Spencer currently lives in Nashville, TN working as a labor and delivery nurse and a wedding videographer. She has always loved photography and took extreme interest while studying abroad in Paris. She gets her creative eye from her mother who is an oil painter.