Dave Canning

OUR DAUGHTER  

Published in The Madison Review Fall 2021

MOM’S BONES

Published in Sterling Clack Clack Winter 2022

My mom collected the bones of people she loved and kept them on display at home. Her father’s bones were clean and white and dry and placed in the foyer, standing tall at the door ready to greet you like a skeleton at a junior high school science class. A baseball hat that said “The Captain” sat on top of his skull.

She kept her mother’s bones in the bedroom, seated in a salmon–colored–recliner in front of the TV, an old remote control placed firmly in her phalange held together with pins and nails. Mom used to tell me how Grandma cursed at the astronauts as she watched them fly out of the atmosphere in little black and white moving pictures on a small box in the corner of the room, making the sign of the cross and spitting on her own floor, yelling that it was blasphemy, praying for forgiveness and mercy.

Jenny, our childhood dog– a mut mixed of German Shepard and Collie and God knows what else – her bones laid in a chalky pile in the living room next to the fireplace. Mom said she never cared for Jenny. But she did, in her own way. A turkey leg bone sat on the floor next to Jenny’s unhinged jaw.

My dad’s bones were meticulously organized to keep the exact moment and detail of his death frozen in time. He was suspended over the kitchen table by wire, his skull lunging forward and his hand pinned to the part of his ribcage where his heart exploded all those years ago. I was there when it happened, sitting directly across from him and telling him and mom about some girl I met at school who’s name I can’t even remember now. How silly? The last thing going through dad’s brain must have been visions of me finding love, settling down and raising children, right before his whole world and ours busted out of his aorta.

When I did eventually settle down, I invited mom to the wedding, but she declined to attend. Specifically, she told me she couldn’t leave the bones. They needed to be looked after and cared for. She couldn’t possibly leave all those bones in the house alone. Imagine what could happen to them, she said.

After seven years and three miscarriages, my wife and I were able to have a child– a daughter. We named her after mom in hopes that it could help her care about flesh and blood again. We hoped that new life could replace all those old bones of hers. But when we invited mom to the house to see the new baby, she simply talked of the bones and how clean they were. The baby cried in my arms as I bounced her up and down as mom told me on the phone that she was looking forward to herself becoming bones soon. She said that she couldn’t wait until we were all clean and perfect bones, immortal bones that couldn’t be disturbed no matter how hot the sun got or how high the waters rose or how terminal the diagnosis. Bones, she sighed to me on the phone. Oh, to be as perfect as bone.

My Aunt Paula, mom’s younger sister, died a few months later and mom placed her bones in a wooden rocking chair that looked out the front window. She told me it was a good spot for her because she could keep a lookout for thieves and scoundrels. When I asked her how Aunt Paula would know if there were any thieves or scoundrels lurking in the area, on account of her not having any eyes, she just told me the bones have their own way of knowing. The bones always knew, she said.

Against the wishes and better judgement of my wife, I called mom to invite her over for our daughter’s first birthday. She told me she was busy dissolving one of her fingers, her left index finger, in some hydrochloric acid. She said she wanted to get a “sneak peek.” It’ll be like seeing the future, she said. Like a fortune teller looking through a crystal ball.

We got a Christmas card that year from mom. It was a picture of her and her bones. She took a picture with each of them. Her father’s bones by the door, her mother’s bones in the recliner in front of the TV, dad’s bones still hunched and hovering over the kitchen table, Aunt Paula’s bones rocking in the wooden chair, on the lookout for thieves and scoundrels. And mom, in all of them, showing off her entire left hand for the camera, all white and bone.

Mom died the following summer of an aneurysm. Her body was found by a delivery driver who was trying to deliver a bag of Chinese takeout to the family down the street but had shown up at my mother’s address my mistake. The stench of decaying flesh seeping through the front door to the porch made the driver think to call 911. I’m sure he was also alarmed by Aunt Paula’s skeleton looking through the window at him, seeming to judge him with her empty eye sockets.

When I saw her body at the coroner’s I almost didn’t recognize her. It looked as if she hadn’t eaten in months. Her flesh just hung around her frame like clothing five sizes too big. Her entire left arm up to the elbow was bone without any traces of skin or muscle or tissue or sinew. No nerves and no veins. Just clean bone.

I went home that night and ate leftover fried chicken from the fridge while my wife and daughter slept upstairs in their beds, wrapped in their blankets, covered in their muscles and flesh and hair. As my teeth glided along the slick wet bone of the chicken leg, sliding the meat off in one easy motion, I found myself staring at the love seat in the corner of the living room. Grey and blue cushions and a green quilt draped over the back of it. I couldn’t help but think of all the times I invited mom over. To celebrate. To see her granddaughter. To be part of the family. I started to think she might like it there on that love seat, her bones clean and dry and propped up, finally able to watch us live our lives and become bones ourselves.

CAT PARTY

Published in Sterling Clack Clack Summer 2022 / Winner of the National Hemingway Prize in Short Fiction

The blue and green plaid couch in Jason’s basement moved to the beat of the music that played on the stereo, like it had hips and knew all the moves. More than me at least. I put down one of the cans of beer that Bert, Jason’s older brother, got us and looked at my hands. They were definitely getting furry. I looked over at Bert, he was covered in hair– black and shiny and shimmering in the yellow and orange lamp light. He groomed himself with his rough pink tongue.

“The fuck are you looking at?” He hissed, and then caressed his ears which were now on top of his head.

I felt the urge to climb down from the dancing couch to the rug on the floor. It was an old ratty pink rug that looked more like a bathroom towel than a rug and I just had to scratch it. I got down and started to claw at it. The fibers coming up off the rug in between my claws felt so good, I let myself laugh.

“I see it’s kicking in, huh?” Jason said from the other side of the couch. He was a full–on–Maine Coon. His eyes were gold and flashed with specs of green.

“Yeah, I think so.” I clawed some more pink fibers up. “How long has it been?”

Jason was finding a warm sun beam on the floor and laid down in it, belly up. “About twenty minutes, I think?” He stretched his creamy–colored–body out so that every inch was covered in the sun light coming in from the window. “It’s so warm. Like I’m wrapped in a blanket.” He purred and stretched and Bert laughed.

Bert was the one that got us the pills. He was five years older than us and was our usual supplier of all the things kids our age shouldn’t get their hands on. Alcohol, cigarettes, although I didn’t smoke, weed, whatever. He made fun of me sometimes for being, what he called, a bit of a pussy. One time he called me out for getting a similar haircut as his. He accused me of wanting to be him. All I could do in response was put my head down and then he laughed. I hated the sound of that laugh. But he was right. I did want to be him. He reminded me of what I saw in my father from old pictures. He was tall and strong and did things I thought men should do. Currently, he was lifting his tail up high and spraying urine on the carpet.

I started to panic a little bit, which was not unusual for me. The thought of running away flashed in my head. Just escaping out through an open window and into the grass of Jason’s front lawn. I’d run down the street back to my house and scratch at the door to be let in. I’d have to tell mom I took a drug that turned me into a cat. She’d probably cry. She was always asking me if she was a good mother. And this might be proof to her that she wasn’t. And I didn’t want her to think that. But I wanted to run. I was scared and it showed. My backside arched up to the sky and formed a frowny face and my fur stood up at attention.

I wasn’t scared of staying a cat forever. I knew kids in school who took the pills before and put the videos online. I saw them go back to normal in a few hours. I was just scared, in a general sense. Mom called it anxiety and said I got it from her. She said that sometimes bad things other than diseases get passed down to kids. Like bad thoughts. She told me to focus on good thoughts about the future, not negative. So, I licked my paw and groomed my head and thought about how this might be fun. I thought about how maybe Bert would think I was cool. I thought about not having a panic attack and not having Bert and Jason call me a loser for having a panic attack like that one time last summer down by the creek when they pretended to try to drown me.

But thinking about all these things made me worry and the worrying made me cough. I couldn’t stop until I gagged and made a weird sound and felt this pull from the inside of my stomach, like someone was tickling my insides. I dry heaved until a wet ball of hair came plopping out of my mouth.

“Dude, what the fuck?” Bert was on all four of his black paws and pranced over to me. He smelled the hairball with his wet pink nose. “You are so lame.”

Jason unstretched himself and flipped from his back to his paws and walked out of the sunlight and onto cool carpet. “Leave him alone, man.”

“Why should I? He’ll probably just puke up more hairballs all over the place and get us in trouble.” Bert’s tail lifted up in the air like an exclamation point and sprayed some urine in my direction. It smelled like ammonia and battery acid.

“He’s just a runt, give him a break.” Jason hissed. He picked me up by the neck with his teeth and placed me down behind him, putting himself between me and Bert. I looked at my new reflection in the blackness of the TV screen on the counter behind me. I was smaller than them. I looked like a kitten and they looked like cats. I was the runt of the litter.

“Whatever.” Bert walked away with long, effortless strides across the floor, never letting anything but the tips of his toes and the balls of his pink padded feet touch the carpet.

Jason turned to me and I saw his ears wiggle. “What do you wanna do now that we’re cats?”
 I was still thinking about being a runt. “I don’t know.” My little paws kneaded the carpet in front of me.

“I wonder what the wind sounds like with these ears,” he said while looking back towards the window that earlier gave him warm sun light to bathe in. “Or maybe we can go eat some tuna or something.”

Bert chimed in from across the room. “How are you gonna open up a can of tuna, dipshit? You’re a fucking cat.” And then he went back to licking his balls.

“Maybe we can go outside and just like, look at nature and stuff,” I offered up.

Bert laughed that laugh I hated so much because it was his and not mine or my father’s. “Or we can do like real cats do, and kill.”

I felt an anxious heat rise and spread all over my body like pins and needles getting stuck in me.

“You know, cats are God’s little murderers. We’re practically put on earth to kill anything that crosses our path.” He said.

I didn’t want to be a cat anymore and I didn’t want to be a runt and I didn’t want to kill anything.

“So, let’s go out there and kill. Like real fucking cats.”

Jason smiled and showed me his sharp wet teeth. “Okay.”

Outside the grass was greener than I ever imagined it could be and I could smell food from a neighbor’s house on the wind and I could feel the vibrations in the air from a nearby swarm of flies. I heard birds singing songs in trees and the earth humming along with them.

“What’re you gonna kill?” Jason asked me.

“I don’t know.”

Bert leapt out from a bush. “I wanna kill a big fat rat.”

“Gross,” said Jason, squinting his gold eyes that now flashed specs of blue in the sunlight.

“It’s not gross! That’s what cats do. They’re pest control. Mice, rats, birds, all that shit.”

“Birds aren’t pests, are they?” I asked while still listening to their songs.

“You’re a pest. Maybe I should kill you.”

Bert’s eyes fixed on me and his hind legs went stiff and his shoulders and head dipped down low to the ground as he inched closer and closer to where I sat my little runt rump on the grass. My brain told me to run but my body just sat there and tried to look tough. I squinted my eyes and showed my teeth which were like little cartoon nubs in my mouth. I raised my shoulders up and tried to look big. But I wasn’t big. Bert swiped me across the face with his claws. I felt the air whoosh into my flesh through the cuts and burn on contact. He swiped me on the side of the neck and I went hot all over.

Jason just stood there. I wanted him to say something. I wanted him to tell his brother to stop or to rush in and make it stop. But he just stood there on his four legs smelling my blood on the air and watching my fur coat turn all red and black and wet.

“Whaddya think? Should I finish off this pussy cat?” Bert licked his claws with his sharp tongue.

“Nah. He’s just a runt,” said Jason. “Let’s go find that rat.”

I watched them saunter off across the tall grass that looked more yellow now than green. Through air that smelt like neighbor’s stinking and rotting leftovers thrown in garbage cans. Past birds who stopped singing their songs and now looked down from their perch and laughed at me. There was just the smell of my own stinking insides crawling out and the sound of my pounding heart ripping itself up.

I limped over to a row of green and brown shrubs by the sidewalk and waited to change back into me. It took a couple of hours but eventually my fur was just skin and my claws were just fingers with dirt under the nails like before. I sat naked and fleshy and hiding under cover of shrubbery as the black and red blood caked and congealed to my cheek and neck.

I ripped off as many branches of the shrubs as I could to cover my junk and bare bottom and then walked home through backyards until I reached mine. I walked through the gate in my metal fence and up the front steps that seemed bigger and taller and more intimidating than ever before and finally in through my back door.

Mom sat at the kitchen table with the lights off, only illuminated by the moonlight from the window. She was drinking her brandy and just sitting there in the dark, as she often did on what she called bad nights. She didn’t mention anything about me being naked or having blood on me. She just stared through the darkness, blinded by shadows and brandy and bad thoughts.

“Am I a bad mother?”

“No.”

I put my fingers into one of the cuts in my cheek and felt it sting. “Mom?

“Yeah?”

“Am I runt?”

She took a sip of brandy and I could hear her teeth bite down on the ice and then on the rim of the glass. I thought she would chew the whole thing and crunch it up in her mouth and swallow everything – the drink and the glass, the room and the shadows, and me. Everything. I wish she could.

DODGE JULIUS

Published in The Madison Review Fall 2020

PICKLE JARS

Published in The Festival Review Summer 2021

EAT

Published in Literally Stories Spring 2020