Talk Vomit

By Rachel Barber

The dog is beginning to change. My husband says it’s only a season—that some pup’s coats harden with the winter frost. When I rub my fingers through her long hair, they stick, caught in clumps like little bobbles. I think she’s hiding something deep in her fur. I pull. She nips the air.

The dog has begun to change. When I take out the trash, she doesn’t sniff it. Not one raised snout nor pressed nostril. Instead, when she sniffs, it’s in my direction. She sniffs when she thinks I’m not looking, creaking her head, flaring her nose. I see her out of the corner of my eye.

The dog is changing. She never follows me nor my husband to the door anymore. She sits by the end of the couch, ears forward, eyes on the bright lights of our Roku. She follows the characters conjured out of plastic, wires, and glass. Traces the Thing run across Antarctic tundra. She silently follows the form of a bounding hound in ice and snow. When her eyes aren’t following me.

The dog has changed. I pour out Dog Chow that she doesn’t eat. My husband says she needs something better—costlier—and we double-down on dogfood from the berry blue bag that’s marketed as equal to diamonds. And the marketers must be right. My wedding ring cost less. Still, the dog neither perks up nor wags her tail when pet food rings against metal, and metal drums on the floor. She doesn’t eat, yet she doesn’t thin. Just occasionally emits a sound like a beep from the back of her throat.

The dog was a change. A Christmas gift to our five-year-old son. Who will pay for this dog? I asked, while “Santa Baby” played on the pet store speakers. As I stared at the thing, all teeth and drool, I asked, do you know how much she will cost? And don’t we already have enough (enough belongings, enough problems, enough life I managed not to say)? My husband said she would pay for herself—an investment. He promised. Anything we welcome into our home will give more than it takes.

The dog has been changing our home. She left a trail of slime on the kitchen floor. Green and gooey and smelling like curdled milk. She chewed through the plastic and Styrofoam meat containers in our fridge, but left the steak, ground beef, and blood behind. She’s started invading our beds in the night, curling up beside my husband, pushing me out. I find her some evenings on my son’s mattress, seated beside him with her jaw hanging over his head. Her black eyes gleam in the night light’s glow.

I know what she wants. What all invaders want. A body or a house or a bed or a life that does not belong to her. My husband tells me I’m changing the subject. Do we want to have another or not?

My son says to me, you’ve changed, when I tuck him in at night, skip the bedtime story for fear my voice will crack, lock his door in the hope that she can’t pick locks, that she doesn’t know how to unscrew them. 

You’ve changed, my husband says, when I buy a kennel and lock up the dog each night only to find her sitting beside my bed in the morning, eyes level with mine. 

You’ve changed, they say at work, when I check my phone every five seconds for word of some new disaster—a fire that’s burned down the home, a broken into house that was never broken into, a family member foaming at the mouth or lying in claw-shredded pieces or an ooze-melted puddle on the floor. And when I am the first person home, the only person in the house, alone with that silent dog—who never barks, not even at the postman, who even now wreaks of oil, like she’s filled the bathtub with it and rolled around in it, which is another thing, she never minds baths, but she never smells better and only looks greasier afterwards—when I am the first person home alone with that dog whose black eyes have begun to glow like embers, who drips green goo from her jaw, who never eats but will not die, she stares at me like am the stranger.

And the beep, the beep in her throat is a bomb, like something is about to blow.