All in Non-Fiction

I can state with confidence that I’d never kick a robot. But then again, I’m the kind of soft-hearted fool who relocates spiders and bugs instead of killing them. (I once decided not to spray a cockroach because it turned and looked at me. It saw me, we shared a moment, and I balked.)

We grew especially tired, though, of the 15 minutes of sunscreen application my mother insisted on before we jumped in the pool, which in Los Angeles was nearly every day. During these precautionary sessions, my father would stroll past the kitchen table, only to see the two of us standing upright, our arms extended outwards, creating a rigid t-shape with our bodies.

The dog’s head lifted from where he lay in a bed of dirt. He looked up with dulled eyes, panting in the blunt rays of an indifferent scorching summer sun. A heavy chain held him to a weathered post, its radius too small to reach the shade of a nearby battered and slumping back porch. Sweat trickled down the center of my back as I walked towards him.

My sister called me that night. I sat on my bed, with the lights off, as she talked. If I couldn’t see anything of my room, I could imagine I was home and she was talking to me from across the bedroom we’d shared all through our childhood. I could imagine she was telling me secrets about the boys she had crushes on and the teachers she hated. 

When we returned for breakfast, she watched with surprising disinterest as dog food bowls were filled on the counter. I guess she’d never been fed from a bowl. But when it was her turn to eat, she devoured it as though she’d never been fed at all. I noticed when we were outside that she ate dirt, and wondered if this is how she’d been surviving. “What a life,” I told Bill. He just stared quietly.

On the day of Loki’s last class, it all clicks.  We perform all the tasks correctly and pass the test.  Loki gets a Fozzie Bear toy and a certificate, and I take some pictures of him in a little doggie graduation hat.  I’ve never been prouder.  We did it!  Together.  We are a team.