By Trevor Fuller
11/6
Here she is, recovered. Still, she refuses to eat afterwards, doesn’t accept food from our hand, stares at us almost accusatory when we hold a treat out to her. A whole life of learned behavior supports this suspicion. Since she was one, we have snuck pills into her food–her prescriptions. She can likely smell them in the kibble. They’re all the stuff that smells like the other side of good health.
12/7
She also gets hemp treats every morning to manage her anxiety. We are anxious people, and dogs take after their owners, so it follows she might be anxious. The vet likes to say so, that she’s anxious, but she sleeps most of the day, and when she’s not sleeping, she’s out walking with us, her tail rallying between her hind legs. In other words, her dreams must be burdensome. Perhaps she dreams of her food, poisoned.
1/2
Major shifts in brain activity trigger them–transitioning in and out of sleep is a demanding operation for the brain, regardless of species. The majority of her episodes occur near dawn. She’s also a nocturnal breed and likes to investigate her food bowl late at night. Sometimes she leaves herself a nighttime meal, usually her dinner she refused to eat earlier in the day. Her suspicion apparently lacks the stamina of Earth’s rotation.
2/4
When she has an episode, we don’t take her walking the rest of the day. We fear a walk might trigger another episode. That isn’t to say we don’t take her out, we do, but it is especially bad to be with her when she has an episode in public, because you cannot help her. You cannot help her in private, but in private no one can see you do nothing. In public, she falls over and starts swim-kicking on the ground, her jaw pulling back in a tortured rictus as she unleashes a sequence of crazed yips, and what you do is you stand there holding the leash and watch. People drive by and witness you standing there watching your dog convulse demonically on the ground. Their mouths drop, and they remember your face. You’re the one who enjoys watching. You’re the one who stands there in a crisis and does nothing.
3/15
A recurring topic of discussion is what triggers them, the episodes. We have a conversation about it every few months like we haven’t had a conversation about it before, and we say roughly the same things we say every time we have the conversation: pesticides, lack of exercise, air fresheners, us, our anxiety. We always end with a shrug and mutual “We’ll never know.” We have arrived at an understanding that part of our care for her entails an intimate exchange with ambiguity.
4/11
Still, the goal is management. You can’t eliminate the episodes altogether, or so the experts tell us, but, ideally, she should go six months in between sets. So we administer bidaily dosages of phenobarbital, levetiracetam, and zonisamide. We buy her neurocareful food that requires a prescription from our vet. We enclose her in a portable playpen at night so that if she has a seizure while we sleep, and we don’t hear her, she won’t run herself into a table or cocoon herself in a wire under a desk, which happens: she goes blind during the postictal state, the period after the seizure. The world becomes a temporary deception, and the truth always seems to lie somewhere in the wires under our desks that will pull down the computers like comets.
5/6
We naturally attend the vet every half year. We tell them we followed the rules, we administered the plan, we didn’t achieve the results. That’s how it is. We ask for the best way to alter these settings handed down to us by nature. Here’s the information for a neurologist. Here’s a prescription for exotically named alternative medicines. Here’s a new diet with supplements and no meat. We thank them for all these new possibilities for failure.
6/1
Truthfully, we stopped using air fresheners one day, and she didn’t have an episode for three months, the longest she has ever gone without one. It must be something in the air. All the itinerant breezes pregnant with unwelcome particulate matter.
But we’ll never know.
7/20
And the day she begins accepting food from your hand again will come without a sign. But it’s a message. She writes that she forgives you. Her tongue does the signing.
Trevor Fuller currently teaches at Dallas College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Story Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Wigleaf: (very) short fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly and The Saturday Evening Post, among others.
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