X-Ray Specs

Much has been said of dogs’ sense of smell. Three hundred million olfactory receptors, on average, compared to the six million of your average human.

But we almost never talk about the eyes. Which is maybe because what they see is so immeasurable, so beyond tabulation, so far past the spectrum we’ve known and classified. For instance, when we see a noose, they see a leash. How do you create a formula, a system of meaning, for something like that? Where we see strangulation, they see the price of freedom. Where we see the possibility of a body swaying from the rafters, they see a means to pull us along, to make us follow them into ever deeper realizations of the morning, the afternoon, the night. In short, they see time along a different continuum, they see it in front of them, and we, most of all me, increasingly see it behind. Case in point: here I am once again way ahead of myself, when the story I wanted to tell was the time, yesterday, I went to the animal shelter. Passing by a cage I felt myself paused in front of a mirror. The two dogs inside looked at me with such pity I was reminded of what I’d hoped, in paying the place a visit, to escape. I saw my own abandonment, my own entrapment, my own insatiable need in averting my eyes from them. It was then I noticed the noose. You know the rest.

Real Dicks

I love the detective stories that never get printed, much less written. The real realism, that’s what I’m talking about. The guy who spent the entirety of his thirty plus years sitting surveillance in the car, drinking coffee, slapping the occasional photograph against his thigh, or using it to cool himself like a fan, solving from a distance every banal case of infidelity, tax evasion, being a deadbeat dad. Not a single fist-fight in all those thirty years. Not a single back and forth with a corrupt policeman. Not even the whiff of perfume in the stairwell, never mind some mysterious lady waltzing through the front office. Or the guy who created databases of tire tracks for twenty-five years, which police then used to identify the marks left by getaway and otherwise suspicious vehicles, tracking them by winter and summer tires and all-season radials. The guy’s wife was so utterly bored with him. She’d decided to marry him because being a detective sounded tough and romantic, even if he looked like a turtle in those little round glasses. But the only excitement she ever saw was when he ran down to Canadian Tire because Toyo had just released a new Run-Flat. Or the guy who was a private eye of the dead—please, it sounds more interesting than it is—always on scene after the bad guy had already been shot dead by another mobster or the police. Say what you will about their rap sheets, or the reputations swirling around them in the underworld, or the news stories about the crimes they got away with, when you see them dead like that, on the floor, arms stretched out in their really bad tough-guy clothes, the obligatory cheap jewelry mart necklace, you aren’t really afraid of them anymore. The mystique is gone. He had a hard time after retirement, he said. He couldn’t for the life of him even find a fish to bite the hook he cast off the pier.

Tamas Dobozy lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and has published four books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, Siege 13: Stories (which won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award: Fiction, and the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award), and most recently, Ghost Geographies: Fictions. Tamas has published over seventy short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, won an O Henry Prize in 2011, and the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards in 2014.