The Dog
When a person sits in water long enough, she starts to bloat. The thick skin of her hands and feet stretch and pull away from the muscle until she’s as wrinkled as an old woman. I remember once—after my fiancé had broken off our engagement and our friends had split and scattered—sitting in my bathtub and watching the water drain until I heard the gurgling of the last drop like someone choking on her own phlegm. The air had begun to cool and my teeth had started to chatter, and still, I sat, my knees to my chin, my sits bone pressed hard against the unforgiving porcelain, staring into the canyons of my disfigured fingerprints.
Once, at my family’s lake house when I was still a small child, just old enough to wander and explore without my hand in my mother’s, my cousin and I found a dead animal, floating face down in the water. We were strolling along the dock sidewalks, poking sticks at the lily pads and tossing helicopter pods into the lake, when she poked the thing enough to turn it over.
We’d thought it was a muskrat or beaver. Never a dog. Dogs don’t lie, collarless, drowned and abandoned. Entangled in algae. It had been a mutt, its gray and black mottled fur—much like my own dog’s—bobbing in a passing boat’s wake. Its body had bloated, its face almost unrecognizably dog so that we were forced to debate and discern its genus; forced to name the unnamable. Bloated like hopelessness.
I stayed in that tub, naked and empty and still, longer than I should have. Until I felt like something else. Until I was unrecognizable. And I wondered, if it hadn’t been for all that fur and I could have seen the dog’s skin, would it have been as wrinkled as mine was? Would I have seen the darkness within the folds of a skin stretched to its limit?
Jody Gerbig considers herself mostly a novelist, having published Unmasked by an indie press in 2008. However, between teaching high school English and participating in workshops, Jody has recently been writing nonfiction almost exclusively. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, Chad.