“Cataracts” by Nikki Barnhart

A free dog—my mother knew someone who knew someone. The catch was that she was going blind: cataracts, a new word for me, three syllables click-clacking in my mouth. When I was nine, we drove one day to a town called Florida, New York, a place exotic only in its mismatching nowhereness. A woman there in a sad ranch house bred Jack Russells. The dog’s name, the one for the taking, was Kelty, Scottish slang for a glass of liquor pushed upon a reticent drinker—I wouldn’t know this meaning until after she was gone. We took her even though she bit me when I reached for her, hiding under the overstuffed couch, the rest of the dogs barking behind chain-links outside. She chose my father instantly, crawling on top of him as he put the car in gear for the journey home, forcing him to switch seats with my mother. “Dog hog,” I pouted from the back.

Later, when she was ours, I would see the clouds forming in one eye, and soon after, the other. My father taught me how to spot a storm coming: how to watch the sky, to check if the leaves were quivering spine-side up. I would wonder how much she understood about what was happening to her, as her sense of the world cast over—a haze in its wake, fog, and then nothing.

My father thought she already knew about loss, or that’s what he made me believe. “What’s she thinking about?” I would ask him as she stretched out on his bed—my mother’s down the hall, their rooms and lives as separate as living under the same roof would allow—lying still in the breeze of the oscillating fan, eyes fixed somewhere she could see less and less of. “She misses her puppies,” he would tell me, and I believed him. My father taught me how to read the world; his narration of it became what I understood as truth.

She was my first dog—my family’s first dog as whatever kind of unit we hobbled together. I didn’t understand then that all of this was a performance, one my parents had not practiced or perfected, but one they were only improvising. She was conscripted into a part of our family act as she longed for her own, the litters she’d birthed before her eyes started clouding. When my parents fought downstairs, I would take her into my closet with me, and we would hide there together. These were the only times she would sit still on my lap.

Sometimes, usually at dusk in summer, my father would let her off the leash. She would dash around the yard, careening around us in loose almost-circles before breaking any hope of symmetry and charging off again, suddenly a different dog. More often than not, often enough for him to know better, she would bolt past us into the woods behind our house, too fast for us to catch her. She would disappear for a long time, even when we called her over and over. When the sky finally went to black, my mother and I would go inside, but my father would still be out there, yelling for her, his whistle reverberating against the dark. “Idiot,” my mother would mumble as we watched his silhouette through the kitchen windows. Even through double-panes, I could hear him summon her, his voice steadfast, unwavering, reciting her name like an incantation to bring her back: Kelty. Eventually, always, she would come hurtling through the trees, straight towards home, as quick as she left us, but until then, every time, it felt like she was gone forever.

Now both she and my father are gone, forever, but I’m still trying to see through some kind of window, one that looks into my childhood home and not out of it—even as it clouds over, even as it gets murky, even if all I can see of them, and everything else I’ve lost is just shadows.

Painting of a canine between dark pink trees in odd colors like pink, purple and dark blue.

Featured art: “Waiting for You” by Iva Dukic

 

Nikki Barnhart is an MFA candidate in fiction at The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in Juked, The Rumpus, Newtown Literary, and elsewhere.

Iva Dukic is an artist and illustrator from Croatia. She graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts with a focus on the importance of picture books in children's development. @zmamorije_art

Previous
Previous

On Keeping a Blog: the value of revising and revisiting records

Next
Next

“endangered” by Heather Lang-Cassera