Read Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction for Free Online Page B

and killed all those people. It seems as ludicrous as everything else. I can’t get my mind to work right, I’m still operating on yesterday’s facts; today hasn’t jelled yet. “It’s a good thing none of this happened,” I say to my face. A knock on the door and I open it.
    The collie is swaying on her feet, toenails clenched to keep from sliding on the wood floor. Julene’s hesitant face. “She wanted to come visit you,” she tells me. I bring her in and close the door. We sit by the tub. She lifts her long nose to my face and I take her muzzle and we move through the gears slowly, first second third fourth, all the way through town, until what happened has happened and we know it has happened. We return to the living room. The second wave of calls is starting to come in, from those who just saw the faces on the news. Shirley screens. A knock comes on the door. Julene settles the dog down again on her blanket. It’s the husband at the door, looking frantic. He hugs me hard but I’m made of cement, arms stuck in a down position.
    The women immediately clear out, taking their leave, looking at the floor. Suddenly it’s only me and him, sitting in our living room on a Friday night, just like always. I realize it took quite a bit of courage for him to come to the house when he did, facing all those women who think he’s the Antichrist. The dogs are crowded against him on the couch and he’s wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before. He’s here to help me get through this. Me. He knows how awful this must be. Awful. He knows how I felt about Chris. Past tense. I have to put my hands over my face for a minute.
    We sit silently in our living room. He watches the mute television screen and I watch him. The planes and ridges of his face are more familiar to me than my own. I understand that he wishes even more than I do that he still loved me. When he looks over at me, it’s with an expression I’ve seen before. It’s the way he looks at the dog on the blanket.
    I get his coat and follow him out into the cold November night. There are stars and stars and stars. The sky is full of dead men, drifting in the blackness like helium balloons. My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes. I go back inside where the heat is.
    The house is empty and dim, full of dogs and cigarette butts. The collie has peed again. The television is flickering Special Report across the screen and I turn it off before the pictures appear. I bring blankets up, fresh and warm from the dryer.
    After all the commotion the living room feels cavernous and dead. A branch scrapes against the house and for a brief instant I feel a surge of hope. They might have come back. And I stand at the foot of the stairs staring up into the darkness, listening for the sounds of their little squirrel feet. Silence. No matter how much you miss them. They never come back once they’re gone.
     
       
    I wake her up three times between midnight and dawn. She doesn’t usually sleep this soundly but all the chaos and company in the house tonight have made her more tired than usual. The Lab wakes and drowsily begins licking her lower region. She stops and stares at me, trying to make out my face in the dark, then gives up and sleeps. The brown dog is flat on her back with her paws limp, wedged between me and the back of the couch.
    I’ve propped myself so I’ll be able to see when dawn starts to arrive. For now there are still planets and stars. Above the black branches of a maple is the dog star, Sirius, my personal favorite. The dusty rings of Saturn. Io, Jupiter’s moon.
    When I think I can’t bear it for one more minute I reach down and nudge her gently with my dog-arm. She rises slowly, faltering, and stands over me in the darkness. My peer, my colleague. In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the Earth meet the forces of the