Chopper was the bitch who started it all. She lay on the ground in front of me, her sagging belly crowned with thick leathery nipples. When she rolled over, I could see all six of them lined up, poking through her black fur like tombstones. Around us, her descendants filled the yard, nipping at each other and sniffing by the barbeque for dropped food. Here was Victor’s livelihood, tussling in the dirt. They had outlived their master.
I had driven 100 miles to be here. I could tell I was getting close when the billboards said things like Stop Fentanyl Overdoses or Are You Going to Hell? Victor’s eldest son answered the door and handed me a t-shirt, identical to the one he was wearing: Victor kneeling next to Chopper with wings photoshopped onto his back.
It was clear no one knew what to do. Victor was the first of the cousins to die. We crowded into his house and spilled out into the backyard, uncles and puppies and babies, and everyone asking me questions like “Where’s your boyfriend?” or “When are you moving back?”
I reached for a puppy instead of answering. He had that soft loose skin that made it hard for me to stop touching him. I felt a hand on my shoulder. My favorite cousin was here. “If I die,” he whispered, “Don’t put me on a fucking t-shirt.”
Three joints were in circulation at all times, so as soon as one left my fingers, someone passed me another one. To decline would be to say, “I don’t belong here anymore.” I did not decline. When I looked at the faces of the rottweilers around me, their markings seemed more fantastical than I remembered. More grotesque, like Juggalo face paint. The puppy squirmed in my arms and I set him down.
There was always something to learn from my cousins. Like how to burn trash in your yard without legal recourse. “Have the kids roast marshmallows over it, that way it’s a cooking fire,” Victor’s brother told me. If my boyfriend were here he would say, “Your family sure does love a scam, don’t they.” But he was not here. I had started a whole fight with him just to get what I wanted, which was to come to Victor’s house alone.
My favorite cousin opened a black cherry White Claw for me. “You good?” he asked. It was slick and cold against my palm. If I took a drink, I would be making my mind up.
Someone handed me a baby, which meant they could not tell how high I was, and I held her on my hip, surprised at how natural it was, to carry a baby, even when I was high and my mouth felt like it had been wall-papered and I was still holding my drink and deciding what to do with it.
The baby repeated the only word she knew, again and again. I did not want to hear that word right now but I bounced up and down to make her laugh. If my boyfriend were here he would take the White Claw from me and say, “See, you’re a natural.”
A cousin’s girlfriend came to retrieve the baby. “You’re next,” she said, and smiled. After this weekend she would still be here, in this world of dog breeding and insurance fraud and babies, and I would be gone, back to some other world. No one here seemed to worry about what was responsible or what made sense. I was envious. It was becoming clear to me why people chose to procreate. There wasn’t some logic to it, like passing on a part of yourself or populating the earth. It was some other thing. It was a yearning to hear someone call out for you, over and over.
The next morning we all converged on the cemetery in our matching t-shirts. The eldest son drove Victor’s pick-up, the truck bed full of pacing dogs. Not Chopper, though. She sat shotgun, waiting for the son to open the door and scoop her up like a giant baby then set her down next to the grave pit. That’s where Victor’s sons all stood, each of them holding a full-grown rott on a leash. When the casket was lowered, Chopper started to howl. She knew. The other dogs followed, a painful, sustained baying that drowned out all the other noises in my head.
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Cora Lee was born and raised in San Diego. Her work has been featured in Expat Press, Hobart, The Drunken Canal, and Mail Mag, among other publications. More writing can be found at coralee.net.
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image: Claire Hopple is the author of six books. Her fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Forever Mag, Peach Mag, and others. She’s the fiction editor at XRAY. More at clairehopple.com.
Rejection Letters 