Newlyweds
The apartment was small and cheap. It was our first apartment. The walls were porous and there was a fug we could not remove. The landlord was supercilious and cantankerous and treated us as though we were fungus. The landlord had been married five times and was now alone. Our happiness was not contagious. We had jobs and at night if there were nothing on the television we would sit by the window and talk and I would say things like: “Everybody wanted to be a brave Indian back then. Nobody wanted to be a cowboy. I mean, there was a family called Cassidy and a family called McCarty and a family called Ford on every street.” We would laugh, we always laughed. One night I thought I had finished the last piece of sushi, a luxury. In the morning I saw the last piece of sushi still in the fridge. Brushing my teeth, I removed cockroach legs. This still makes us laugh. Our penury we found edifying. We lived next to a place where they put down dogs. The dogs were unwanted because they were deemed strange. Many of the dogs were deformed. I saw one dog that had five legs. We saw a dog with three eyes. One dog tried to communicate with us and we were sure it was begging for our help. Another had wings. They were fly’s wings, diaphanous. I watched it fly, but it could never get over the fence, it was too heavy and the wings though big were too light. In the morning I realized the dog with the wings was only a dream. The nights were full of the howls. From our bedroom window as far as the eye could see it was a field of concrete. Housed precariously on the concrete were many little huts. The dogs were kept in the little huts until it was time for them to be injected with the poison. One hot night we sat by the open window. The hot air was humming and heavy with the scent of dogs. The night sky was unblemished and we could see the planets. We could see as far as the imagination. The dogs had not been locked in the little huts. That night we watched an array of different dogs copulate until they fell down with exhaustion.
paul kavanagh lives in charlotte