LITTER

By Ben Greenman / @2019

From forthcoming collection of stories, as yet untitled

Once there were dogs. They were in the neighborhood. They gamboled and panted. Tails wagged. Then boys with stones began to move in to the houses, first on the north side of the street, then on the south side. They weighed those stones in their hands and flung them at the dogs. Many were struck and injured. Three were killed. The rest ran off. 

Only one boy held himself apart from the violence. He became a historian of the neighborhood. He became me—or rather, I was already that boy. The history of the neighborhood weighed on me like an illness. I remembered what I had witnessed and recorded it all in a series of notebooks. I numbered them up until nine or ten and then lost count.

Over one summer I made of an acquaintance one of the other boys. He was as bad as the rest, but with hope of improvement. I invited him to my house to read the chronicle I had written. He sat at a chair in my kitchen, my notebooks piled next to him on the table, and read without saying a word. When he was done with the first notebook, he went on to the next. When he was done with the second notebook, he stood up. “In this neighborhood we did our best,” he said. “People can say all kinds of things. That cannot be stopped. But there is no sense of how the dogs wronged us. They took our food. They fouled our lawns and carpets. When we tried to stop them, they barked at us and frightened us, and when we tried to stop that, they bit us.” 

That boy stayed standing. “I had a dream the other night,” he said. “I was locked in a cage, with little hope of ever getting out. I understood that it was the neighborhood, but also that I was being punished for what we had done to others. At that moment a pack of dogs appeared. ‘Kill him,’ said one. ‘Starve him,’ said another. A brindle terrier stepped in front of the cage. ‘I cannot do that,’ he said. I was so relieved. I woke feeling more kindly toward the dogs, or at least less angry. That set me on the path which brought me in time to this kitchen.”

He stopped his story. I came to believe that we were friends. Only a friend would share such a story. We met in my house once or twice a month for years. Eventually we were young men, drinking too much whiskey, making too much of ourselves and too little of the girls who lived a few streets over. It was said that they had dogs, too, and treated them with kindness.

One day we made a pledge to visit them. We set out at dawn.  All along the first street was a series of caverns. At the corner was a sheer rock face. As we passed the second street we heard a loud crack, followed by a rumble. My friend clutched his ears. I clutched mine. It was thunder, betokening rain. We turned back. We’d meet the girls some other time, I told him. I was trying to cheer him up but the effect was something else entirely. As we rounded onto our corner, he turned to me. “I wish I there were dogs here,” he said. His face was wet with tears. “I’m going to read the rest of your notebooks,” he said. “I promise.” We walked down the middle of the street, neither on the north side nor the south, careful to avoid the lawns and the stones all over them that had been thrown there but never picked up.