Where The Dog Is

By Mabry Sansbury

You’re standing in your new old kitchen, back to the dripping sink, at a little past three in the morning. Deana Carter buzzes into your broken ears and your mug of chamomile tea says “Home Is Where The Dog Is.” There are no dogs here, not even a cat, because your childhood home is too far for a cat to travel, and you can’t leave her by herself come Christmas. You’re wearing your dad’s Bonnaroo 2006 XL shirt because your mom thought it was yours and by the time you noticed, you were already unpacked in your new old room. You’ve only just arrived but you already feel the urge to flee somewhere, anywhere, into the orange-gold streetlamps, into the arms of someone unseen who catches you and strokes your hair and laughs at your jokes. The itch to pick up and leave like you were never there, to start a mythos in your wake, to spend the rest of your life outrunning it. To arrive and leave before the shockwaves hit anyone else. To sit in a diner in No One, New Hampshire and eat scrambled eggs from a webbed dinner plate. To take your plants, your babies, and swim across the Atlantic to the man you want to marry and ask him how quickly he can pack a bag. To drive to New Mexico in a dirty Mini Cooper and watch the sun rise behind you. To feel asphalt under your feet as you run from the car as it burns by the road in Lonely, Utah. To let the dust coat your mouth and nose, to sink to your knees in the watery fall sun and scream for all you’ve yet to lose. To die alone and content in a California desert, to discover nothing new or old or used. To maintain stasis in time and mortality until the dawn comes again, this time from the West, the burial ground, the place where the Styx flows back on itself. To meet again those you’ve never met, to spiral away down into the vast ocean of sliding sand and rattling bones. To look into your own gaping, sun-bleached jaws. To smile.