The grass in the meadow was green-blue, a sea under the sea of the bluer sky. It dizzied him. He closed his eyes and promised himself he wouldn’t leave the car. But of course he did. He had to look for Geppetto, terrible name for a dog, too dignified, too doddering, too…specific, but he had told Emily that she could name the dog anything she wanted, and they had just shown her Pinocchio, sat her in front of it during an evening when they wanted to sneak off and get high. “This is Grade-A parenting,” Helen said. Anthony felt guilty but said nothing. Silence could be misconstrued as strength. And that was how their puppy became Geppetto. Figaro would have been better, or Stromboli, even Monstro (it was a big dog, a Doberdane). At least she hadn’t gone with Lampwick. Anthony had been responsible for the dog’s escape. He had been correcting papers in the Student Union, loaded a big stack into the back seat of his car, and needed two trips to get them inside the house. The door didn’t get closed, and that’s when he saw the black dot, already in the distance, heading toward the Meadows. He stepped out of the car. A jade butterfly came up out of the camouflage of the grass carpet and wobbled away carefully, with small loops back toward him, as if it was looking for the dog too. As Anthony looked around, he wondered what had brought him here. Not proximately. That he knew. He wondered about the delicate math of it all, the way his devout youth had given way to reckless years, the first look at Helen in the bar, the night she told him she was pregnant, the drugs at the party they went to after that, the emergence of Emily, the hundred nights he had woken up with a start and tried to face down the darkness and what it gave him, the brutal abstractions of his own fears and uncertainties. He knew he’d find the dog. He knew he never would. He felt like falling to his knees, and did.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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