The Blistering of Sunburns

I am glad summer is over; it was long and the heat did nothing but burn the edges of my mind's open wounds. Autumn so far has been like a salve for them--cool on those spots rubbed raw from many things--after their midsummer rupture in June when my dog Chance died.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been quite so searing if summer had been kinder in general; I don’t know.


His heart was swollen, the vet said. It was crowding his lungs and stomach. He could barely breathe, he couldn't eat. We had to put him down. He was in a horse stall, something we insisted on because we knew how he hated small spaces, like the tiny metal kennels they used there. Mom, Dad and I entered the stall and he ran to greet us, enthusiastic even in his sickly state. I'd already been crying for a while when I sat down on the dirty floor .He crammed himself onto my lap, his tail wagging and my arms were tight around him. I sniffed loudly and he turned to look at me, as if wondering what the matter was. He licked my cheek, then went back to wagging his tail and looking from face to face, so happy to get so much attention all at once. I rested my head on his silky black fur. He leaped off my lap when the doctor entered, excited to see a new person. He was still cheerful, unsure yet trusting, when the vet began injecting his leg. I held his face in my hands as he lay down.



And suddenly I wished he would bite me, so that it wasn’t just this loving, happy, trusting dog being poisoned before my eyes. My Chance. My sweet puppy for eleven years and I am holding him in my arms as he dies. My head is bowed, resting on his, and I whisper to him though sobs that I love him; that I’m sorry for ever yelling at him; that he was a good dog and I love him and I don’t want him to leave me and I love him. I am on the floor with him, my face buried by his ear and I haven’t cried so hard since I was a child. I feel his fur, wet and spiky from my tears, as my face presses into the warmth and I sob. His head is growing limp and heavy on my arm and I’ve lost circulation in it but I don’t care I don’t care I just want to hold him and I don’t want him to go. Please don’t go. At some point, his heart stops beating and he is dead, but I am not quite sure when that point is and I keep holding my Chance and crying long after it is past.



Three days later. It was a white paper bag, the kind usually containing Blue Chip cookies when Dad brings them home, left over from his accounts at the hospitals. I wanted a cookie. The bag crinkled stiffly as I pulled it open, revealing an envelope and a large, rectangular white box. The box was heavy. I removed the envelope, hoping it contained a clue regarding why the cookies were in a box, and whether I could eat one. There was something written on it. I turned it right-side up.

CHANCE JOHNSON.

I didn’t freeze or anything as the realization hit me; I just slipped the envelope back into the bag with the box containing Chance’s ashes. I sat back down on the sofa and pretended the burned remains of my sweet puppy weren’t sitting on the counter top in my kitchen. I knew Dad would be bringing them eventually. It was me who told the vet that, yes, we would like to have the ashes. And I did want them. I wanted to scatter them in the shade by the chimney where he liked to sleep, by the tree where I carved his name, in the tall grass he loved to run in.

I had been reading, but I couldn’t any more. I didn't want to leave the box there, on the cold counter top, left like any random mail.

The weight of his ashes as I climbed the stairs... I didn’t know where to put him. I didn’t want to leave him all alone, up on the dresser, but bringing him over to my nightstand seemed too close for me...I looked at his pictures strewn across my room. I got up. I pulled the box of ashes from the paper sack. I sat on my bed, read the tag attached: “Our deepest sympathies for the loss of your beloved pet. Pet Cremation Services.” I looked at my pictures again, then back at the box. At Chance. I curled up around him and cry and cry and cry, falling asleep with his ashes in my arms.


The next day, I couldn’t just sit and go through pictures like I had been the past few afternoons. This death of my one and only Chance was the awful last straw in a collection of trials that had been piling, piling, piling, and I was just too tired so finally I began to buckle under the weight of it all.


For weeks I’d been writhing inside; needing to run or scream or both or crack or shave my head. I had long dreadlocks at that time, and they seemed to mock me as I looked in the mirror--a physical representation of my heart’s knotted state. Other things were in them too; bad things, caught up in the tangles: memories, feelings, conversations, regrets. They whispered in my ear when I turned my head, reminding me; they were heavy and everywhere.


I found a pair of scissors, started some music. At first I was careful, making sure to cut only what I needed to. But soon my cuts grew faster, choppy and approximate. Seven Swans, snip snip, Come on, Feel the Illinoise, snip, Castaways and Cutouts, snip snip snip; then working ripping teasing out the tangles singing Oh, the Hazards of Love.


I lost myself in the music, keeping time with that sssclk sound that the scissors make, slicing through my hair. Ssssclk, sssclk, ssssssssclk....it was soothing; it was hypnotizing. I thought of nothing. There was only ssssssssclk and the music, and then the fft fft fft of the comb and the occasional snap of a hair breaking as I worked the remainder of the dreads apart.


I don’t know how many numb, methodic hours passed. Enough to play through eight full albums: two Sufjan Stevens, four Decemberists, two Iron and Wine. I think the sun set about halfway through Castaways and Cutouts. But finally, my hair was short again, the dreadlocks combed out. My head throbbed, balanced on neck muscles so tired they could barely hold it up anymore. The muscles in my back were burning, too, and my hands twitched, cramping painfully. Three fingernails were broken. My thumb bleed from a scissor-wound. The dark circles under my red-rimmed eyes were deep. My hair stuck out unevenly in all directions, its texture a strange combination of smooth and frizzy.


I looked how I felt: tired, wrung-out, bitter, and slightly manic.


I looked like Raggedy Ann with a harrowing meth addiction--complete with flat, plastic eyes.


I stared at my reflection, indifferent, then curled up on the floor and fell asleep.