The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater Read Free Book Online Page A

sitting simply at a table, but if you looked a little deeper, something deeply wrong with the sunken stillness in the body, her head on her hand on her elbow, the posture frozen, she sitting so still, as though she could not move. “Mom?” I said, and, indeed, she did not move, not even a twitch to acknowledge my presence. “Mom!” I said again, and then, angry all of a sudden, I reached way forward and yanked her hand away from her face, and the hand fell to her lap, her face staying still, as if her hand were still there supporting it. And even though everything in me told me to keep my distance, I crept closer still, and suddenly I was back in the forest, crouched down on the needled ground, the trees all touching above me and above that the here-and-there chinks of sky. Now, crouching down, I held out my hand and the animal in my mother came alive, woke up; she moved her head and watched me with the sort of suspicion I’d seen before in the faces of fox and deer deciding whether to take whatever it was I offered on the platter of my palm, only now my palm was empty, or, rather, slick with sweat, lined with my whole life, all I had to offer her, and it seemed to work, sort of, she coming closer now, edging towards me in her seat, I with my palm held out and then a clicking came from my mouth, a
here, here
that is uttered simply through sound, and every animal knows it, and she knew it too, and her forehead fell into my outstretched palms, and I was holding her head there, like that, her hair hanging down around me, she just sitting with her head in my hands, and when the weight was just too much I slowly let her go, removing one hand, then the other, and instead of sitting up she sunk still deeper down, her head between her knees, I, not knowing what to do, her stillness much scarier than her sounds. I clicked again, but this time it seemed she didn’t hear, or refused to respond, such surrender a terrible thing to see, the psychic spine snapped. In school the next day a nurse came to inspect all of our spines for abnormal curvatures, and when it was my turn I knelt over the desk in the gym teacher’s office and held my breath as the powdered professional hands pressed the supposedly solid rod that held me up. The exam seemed to take a long time, the nurse’s fingers pressing down between my vertebrae, pushing at the pieces of me.
    I came home from school that day, the feeling of hands all over my back. I opened the front door and looked left, towards the kitchen, the door ajar just as I’d left it the night before and somehow I knew she was still sitting there, in the same seat in the same way, and I didn’t want to see it. I tiptoed past the door and up the stairs, throwing my books onto my bed and looking in on my egg, as I’d done every day now for too many months, picking it up and turning it round and round, and then pressing it to my ear and hearing in there a second silence, and then eyeing the egg, so perfectly formed, so opposite us, with our keys clattering and our heads hanging down and a dead dog and our faces rumpled from fatigue and fear and everything else that goes along with being human. The egg was mocking me and at the same time the egg was calling me forward into a world that was shaped as it should be, the only thing between me and it this hard but slippery shell that I tapped on—
tap tap—
and then I picked up that pencil again and, again, using the pink teat of the eraser, I pressed down on this sphere of silence, and as I pressed an urge came over me to press again, and harder still, to drill down and through the silent shell, so I did, searching for the center, the living gel, the animate animus, the liquid life that is poured into the bottle of every body so deer dance and foxes prance and wrens sing in trees, and I kept going, putting the pencil down now and enclosing the sphere with my whole hot fist, bringing it to me, consumed, suddenly, with the urge to know what was in there,