A patchwork of flyers wrapped the utility pole at the corner of the sun-baked school field by my house. Images of canine faces nosing the camera, spikes of fur, the Shih Tzu with the underbite who had growled at my son’s approach, my boy’s sticky fingers longing to get tangled in its hair. Missing! the posters cried in a flurry of fonts. As months passed, the posters cycloned up the pole, eclipsing the RESIST-stenciled splintering wood. The reminder of what we lost, of our surrender to the voices of the frosted blonde-brigade that filled our screens. The hair-jobs fed us hope. No science to bolster their words. There was no time for science. Just anecdotes, stories, surrender.
A girl in my son’s second grade class revived after a week of decline.
She saw a light, her mother swore, puddles in her eyes. But she came back to me.
We nodded. We knew. Anything to save our children. We feasted on the rumors of treatment, a cure.
In line for takeout tacos, we traded conspiracy theories of a plague released on the west coast by the departing administration, to the site where the seeds of their downfall had been planted.
We nodded in somber lockstep. Anything seemed possible. That houses were becoming affordable in our neighborhood again—a close-in historical gem with 97% walk score!—was all the evidence we needed of the impossible becoming possible.
But didn’t his own son die from the virus? A bald woman at the front of the taco line turned to face us mid-order. Her margarita sweated on the counter.
A voice from behind, You believe that? That boy was just a body double, a faker.
I thought of the poor anonymous boy buried in a gold-plated mausoleum while the true son frolicked in the Caribbean. Maybe the boy would have died anyway. Or he was one of the orphans the administration had created during the family separation era.
The hair-jobs never failed to remind us of the deposed president’s supposed loss of his youngest during the first wave of the virus. If only we’d known then what we know now, they said with downcast eyes.
News of the treatment, the possible cure transmitted as quickly as the virus itself. The illness only affected the young, the children of environmental degradation and a steady diet of chemicals that opened them like sponges to the invading virus. Adults were spared the days of wracking coughs, the tightening in the chest that made the afflicted gasp and their eyes bulge like they could see the hovering ghosts they would soon become. Until their lungs lost the ability to take in oxygen, like balloons riddled with holes. We adults were spared the physical torment, but not the suffering. Since the outbreak, we had died and been reborn. Reconstructed from outrage and loss.
Our only solace was in surrender. We stopped fighting them, the hair-jobs, the voices decrying science and truth. For years we had tallied their lies, held them up like baby Simbas to the sun at dawn, believing that if only we could show the truth, all would be set free. We grew tired. The president’s eventual downfall was not the victory we had dreamed about. The illness was all we cared about now. The illness and how to cure it. The hair-jobs offered one solution: the healing power of dogs.
The cure was in their blood, in their meat, in all the days they sniffed around the dog parks, licked the concrete, and chewed sticks from dying trees. The dogs couldn’t be bred in factories as some in California had tried. The miracle could only be extracted from the dogs we raised, the family pets spread across laps in the flyers wrapping the utility poles. Missing! Golden retrievers that licked faces when the sobs over our lost children stormed our bodies and would not leave us still. Initially there was outrage, refusal, debates. But we capitulated more quickly than seemed proper for a dog-loving city. Anything for our children, for our future.
Artisanal butchery classes were finally proven useful. Craigslist ads multiplied: Dog lover offers cruelty-free release. No judgment. The protests of dog owners were drowned out by the gasps of children, the hysterical cries of parents. The cure wasn’t certain. Children still died after consuming entire Saint Bernards, but it was all we had. When people exhausted their own supply, dogs were snatched from basements and crawlspaces. The sounds of the howls, their joyful barks always gave them away to the human coyotes.
In my arms, my son trembled for days. I held him and watched, molding my face into a mask that would comfort him as he gasped and hacked. Tears slid down my face onto his pale cheeks while he slept. During my vigil, I fell into fitful naps, my head jerking forward as images of the dog we never had flooded my dreams. I remembered all the times my son begged for a dog, for a companion since I refused to give him a sibling.
Be more responsible. Clean your room. Show me you can care for a pet. My unchanging litany raked my mind.
The flyers outnumbered the dogs by the time he went limp in my arms.
Now, when I long for the world with my son strewing his sweat-soaked socks, his crumpled rose of a t-shirt on the couch, or even for the days when he was a shivering wraith on my lap, I remember the dogs bounding across the wide expanse of the field by our house. They chase balls, collide and tussle with each other like bears before rolling in the yellow grass and showing the pink of their bellies. Their surrender. They sniff beneath tails and leave a trail of lick-prints in the dirt, all the while becoming the sacrifice that won’t be enough to save us.
Katherine Sinback’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, daCunha, Gravel, Foliate Oak, Clackamas Literary Review, The Equalizer, The Hunger Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, trampset, and Oyster River Pages, among other publications. She publishes her zine Crudbucket and writes two blogs: the online companion to Crudbucket, and Peabody Project Chronicles 2: Adventures in Pregnancy After Miscarriage. Crudbucket was featured in the 2007 Multnomah County Library “Zinesters Talking” series and was included in the 2016 Alien She exhibit at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Born and raised in Virginia, Katherine lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. She can be found on Twitter @kt_sinback.