Right before my boyfriend broke up with me, he had been updating me with careful regularity on his and his father’s plans to kill the neighbor’s dog. I knew very few details about the dog, other than the fact that it was small and yipped. The yipping had bothered my boyfriend’s father, a retired physicist with too much genius on his hands and skin that crackled like a small fire if he ate too much gluten. I had never met the man, only seen a photo of him in fluttering khaki shorts on a boat, smoking a cigar amidst the salt spray of New Jersey waters. The face was my boyfriend’s face but aged and with a wider jaw, more grizzled and cocksure, a mold he might later pour himself into. Don’t share this photo online, my boyfriend warned me, as if that could be anyone’s first instinct.
Such a man would not easily accept a small dog’s tyranny. Maybe I’m too passive myself. Living in Queens I’m confronted by car alarms crying wolf or a passing siren or the rumble of planes landing at two nearby airports. I have learned to be lulled by the sound of car tires in rain, or drunks singing at two a.m., or the occasional bird on my sill singing to its heart’s content, as my cat nuzzles as closely as possible to the crack where my sputtering a/c meets the window. A small dog’s bark would barely register.
When I met him, my boyfriend was sharing a massive apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with a mysterious roommate who had a heightened fear of mess, which made him anxious, which made him tiptoe, which made his tall frame seem so small. His block was lined with gray and white London plane trees, those hybrids scaly with the smooth white bark of its sycamore parent, skeletal in winter. But his view from his room overlooked the rooftops of Crown Heights, a church bell outlined by only moonlight, gothic and romantic. He handed me binoculars the first night I saw his apartment, and I looked out from his room, feeling very Hitchcock’s Rear Window except I couldn’t get the focus to work, pressed against my own glasses. My hands shook too much to glimpse beyond the blurred outlines of a city stacked like Legos, so I gave up, pressed the binoculars back to his hands, and positioned myself at the window again to see whatever it was I wasn’t seeing.
There was nothing there, just the quiet sleeplessness of the city at night.
When his roommate killed the lease early, a door opened that I didn’t want to open: one where a man could grow soft downy feathers on his skinny arms and take flight. As if on cue, he spent time vacillating between living in NYC and moving to the far country, and took short-term rentals to explore what he wanted. One week he stayed at Averne by the Sea, a sprawling apartment complex in Rockaway Beach that had sprung up, inorganic and boxy and clean white lines, after Hurricane Sandy. The inside looked like apartments I had grown up with in Montgomery, Alabama: open layouts, gray carpet, thin walls, just enough light to give you the sense of possibility when you walked into a room, so you’d overlook the weak wood of the cabinets absorbing humidity, or your neighbor coughing through the thin walls. After Sandy had knocked out so much of New York City, had left salt in subway tunnels and eroded the beaches and destroyed lives, this complex was a testament to newness, cleanliness, homogeneity. Many New Yorkers hated it, the way they hate the empty luxury apartments of Long Island City, and while I’m firmly in that camp, the nostalgia of my suburban upbringing hit me hard, especially while at home I dealt with the cracked tiles of my sloping kitchen floor.
The beach was cold and drizzling, everything so gray and dramatic I may as well have been in a foreign country, filmed against a sad soundtrack. Yet I ran up and down the beach, wild as a child, collecting black seashells so perfectly formed I knew I would not be able to hold on to them. Later I scattered them at a coffee shop, in a botanic garden, in the hands of a small child. At the beach I laughed, filming my boyfriend as he sang a sea shanty in his off-key but somehow soothing voice. There was almost no one there, just us, the loud ocean, and the planes heading for JFK. In that moment I said nothing, just laughed. And on he sang: “O no! I’m not a pirate but a man-o-war, cried he/ A sailing down all on the coasts of High Barbary.”
“What do you think? Two-bedroom apartments for 2000?” he said, driving us back to the Brooklyn we knew and loved, the crowded streets and strollers parked in cafes. “You think you could ever live in the Rockaways?”
“For a year, I could,” I said.
In the space you could hear both of us imagining the other at the beach, one of us just out of frame.
In the Poconos, the Delaware water gap is calm and cold and clear in some places, nestled in soft mountains that promise out-of-towners skiing and lodges that haven’t been updated since my birth year, with welcoming green carpets and too much brown. Everything is quiet, once you’ve bypassed the tourists and built yourself a nice home in the woods. There’s only nature, the mystery of which blooms at night, becomes ripe with darkness upon darkness, a tapestry of danger that one can observe from the comforts of one’s well-lit living room with a fire roaring. That’s the dream. A glass pane separating you from the black bear outside that has come to dig into your trash only to find the can is bear-safe and thus disappointing. Nature is loud, but in alignment with our breath, our heartbeat, our creaking bones. So when some small breed of dog rears its nameless head and barks with abandon, emulating the car alarms of big city living, something must be done about it.
Imagine a physicist for a moment, the kind of man who played with light all day long. Now imagine him, retired and bored, at war with the things he cannot control. Imagine him smoking a cigar on his porch as night falls, the smoke dissipating into the spaces where dusk blurs the horizon. Imagine his peace ripped like nylons by a staccato yip yip yip.
And that’s when he thought of the bear, under-utilized, yet-to-be-weaponized, a hulking beast who sometimes came sniffing for fast food. My boyfriend’s father thought it might be a good idea to start feeding the local bear. Say you take your scraps leftover from dinner—and in their home, there was always a meat for dinner—and you put them out on your property far enough away from your own yard and rather close to your neighbor’s. Every day you enjoy a meal with your wife and your adult son who is crashing at your house while he figures things out, and after you tidy up you collect the bones and gristle of your meal and take them into the night. If your son must hang around, you enlist him to wear night goggles because it’s that kind of family, a family that owns night goggles in the Poconos, as well as fishing poles and hunting rifles and a Swiss army knife. You creep in dead of night to the far edge of your property where it abuts your neighbor’s so that you may proffer the bones, like something from a horror movie to summon an erotic Satan, all cloven hooves and abs.
Later, you check each other for ticks, like primates grooming one another.
Next day, you and your son venture out to see, in fact, the scraps are gone. This is good. This is going as planned. The next night you’ll head out a little further, a little closer to your neighbor’s property, and leave another offering. Then, one day you will stop. You stop feeding the bear, and the bear, hungry and vengeful, will be forced to dine on the nearby dog, his last yip engulfed.
At least, that was the plan. When my boyfriend informed me of this, I laughed it off, mostly because it sounded like something that wouldn’t work. If a bear hadn’t eaten the dog before, why would it begin now? And didn’t bears scare off at the slightest clatter? Still, I received texts about the subject: just got back from our night ops. Night ops, as if what they were doing was special and concentrated, required a skillset a marine sniper might have, or an international spy. There they were, pulling their socks high over their ankles to protect themselves from ticks, and walking in the dark like covert operatives.
Update: the men have returned safely from night ops. No bears had eaten them, no ticks buried in them like shrapnel. My boyfriend’s bravery had seemed out of character, given his brief time in Brooklyn had proven to rattle his nerves. After his lease was up he bounced from temporary sublets to housesitting gigs in the city to his parents’ home in the Poconos. I thought he would return from the mountains, bored and refreshed, ready to eat dim sum and go to shows. I kept it as interesting as I could, in the way that read like every other couple I knew: let’s go to a Mets game/ let’s go to Storm King/ let’s go see a band play at Brooklyn Steel/ let’s walk along the river/ let’s eat this specific cuisine you are not likely to find back home/ let me bake for you and cook for you and bring you mason jars full of water/ let me turn you to the light. Still, his disappearance back home was longer than usual, his texts quick recaps of working on the family’s deck re-staining it, on climbing ladders to address gutters, on sneaking bones to bears. It read like a farmer’s diary from 1885.
What I wanted was a phone call saying, I’ve found this great little spot just an hour outside the city, right on a train line, and I’ll be there soon. To expect him to return to the city would be a bit much, but a compromise might work—a life of commuter lines, glancing up to the constellations peppering Grand Central’s ceiling, as a throng of bodies competed for space briefly, briefly, before returning themselves to the greenery running parallel to the Palisades. My dreams of grabbing the Metro-North, a canvas tote stuffed with an overnight of clothes, were crushed when I received a text saying, you’re a lot of fun, but I’m just not drawn to the city right now.
I remained a lot of fun, by sheer strength of will. I went to yoga two days in a row. I took nature walks in three of the city’s finest parks. I wore a long skirt and gathered it as I climbed the dramatic stone steps up to the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, glancing back coyly at the Hudson river which was muddied by spring storms. I lifted my face to the sun, and suffered a burn on my shoulder where it lay uncovered and bare. I drank herbal iced teas and painted my toenails red and emptied out my heart like a change purse. My friends said, you’re too good for him, the way friends do. I said, Did I tell you he’s trying to kill his neighbor’s dog?
After all this, the dog on the porch is still shouting. It quivers with the fury of needs unmet: a hunger pang, a thirst, the darting of squirrels shaking the branches, indecipherable noise in the shadows while the family sleeps. Maybe, too, it is lonely, left out too long when it wants only to curl up, a diluted wolf burrowed in the family nest. Maybe it senses danger, sees a lanky man on the roof pulling leaves from the gutter, which shower down to another man below. An overwhelming parade of scents: the heavy chemical stain drying in the sun, dew-bent grass steaming by noon, a heady tobacco as the men smoke cigars to celebrate—what? What is it that brings them joy? Will they be sharing it? Will they be marching over here and sharing it? Is it a treat?
And let’s not forget, as the men so clearly did, on the life of the bear, who was not designed by nature to be such a pawn. Surely, these men bred by mountains and water, by the soft earth that exhales sweet scent in the summer heat, would know what the bear means in her long lunge towards life.
She treads where she is not supposed to tread, and digs where she is not supposed to dig, and eats whatever she pleases. She should be able to recognize a trap by now, know that it does not always have steel teeth, know that silence belies danger, and that though the men are soft-bodied they are quiet and clever and watching. She should see the bones for what they are, placed unnaturally on a trail made by human hands, but she is very, very hungry.
And she will have her fill.
Originally hailing from Alabama, Miranda Dennis studied at Hollins University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her poetry has previously been published in Meridian, storySouth, Jellyfish magazine, Cold Mountain Review, and Watershed Review. Additionally, her essays have appeared in Quail Bell Magazine and Granta online. She works in product marketing for a digital advertising firm in Manhattan and lives with a fat tuxedo cat in upper Manhattan.
