1
Charlie
I hatethe termneat freak. Well, I hate thefreakpart. Like there’s anything deviant about wanting to keep things tidy. At worst, people don’t notice all the effort you put into it. At best, they’re subconsciously impressed and want to visit again.
What’s the alternative? There’s nothing nice about showing up somewhere new and being greeted by bowls crusted with last night’s tomato sauce and half-empty coffee mugs that are slowly going moldy.
So, yes, I like to keep my place clean. It’s my place. What’s it to you if there are four kinds of spray cleaners under my bathroom sink? Those scrubby bubbles don’t work on everything.
Specifically, scrubby bubbles are not going to do anything for the smear of puppy poop that has run the entire length of my front hall before infusing itself into the fibers of my white, organic, Afghan goat wool rug—don’t judge me. I bought that rug at a garage sale. A nice one.
And it’s going to take a lot of bubbles to deal with what looks like an entire bottle’s worth of maple syrup congealed to the kitchen tiles in the last—I glance at my watch—ninety-seven minutes since I left the apartment and went to Bold Brew to get caught up on some work. I had a cold last week and got behind. Those descriptions of flogging scenes and puppy play don’t write themselves.
“Athena, what have you done?” I say.
Of course, there is no reply.
She knows when she’s in trouble.
The bedroom door is tellingly ajar. I left Athena in the bathroom, so I don’t know how she managed to get not one but two doors open, but it is impossible to ignore the very sticky-looking husky asleep on my bed.
Did I mention that Little Miss Mayhem appears to have emptied my entire underwear drawer before she passed out? My favorite pair of pistachio-colored boxer briefs are now basically a jockstrap, both ass cheeks chewed to nothing, and theactualjockstrap I bought because I thought Gavin might like it on me is currently wrapped around Athena’s neck. She is a diva through and through, and even as the anger and disappointment that are basically my permanent state of being these days try to overwhelm me, I have to admit the purple lace looks great against her fur.
There’s a bump at the door, and I turn just in time to see my Roomba whir two hundred and seventy degrees before it heads back down the hall, leaving a suspicious skid mark in its wake.
“Wait. Jesus. Shit. Stop.” I dash after it, my sock feet slipping on the hardwood and whatever the brown stuff—yeah, definitely more poop, judging by the smell—is. The Roomba whirs on, turning for my office.
“Stop!” I shout, but it blithely passes through the open door and—“Oh my God.”
I would be worried about the way my robot vacuum is turning my whole apartment into a biohazard, except now I’ve been confronted by the aftermath of a paper snowstorm.
“No. No no no no no.” I drop to my knees, finally catching the Roomba as it rolls over part of a torn page that readsChapter 49.
Well.
That chapter needed work anyway.
I flip the Roomba onto its back like a turtle. The motor continues to rumble for a second before an error light flashes, red against the white detritus on the floor, but I ignore it.
She has destroyed it all.
All the training manuals say you’re not supposed to call your dog bad. There’s no such thing as bad dogs, just dogs without enough training. But in this moment, as I pick up the pieces of the manuscript that my dog has painstakingly turned into confetti, I want to call her bad and a million other names, and I’m only a little sorry about it.
At first, I try to make some sense of the mess. Maybe I can tape the pieces back together.
But no, the farther into the debris I get, the more obvious it becomes that she must have gotten bored somewhere along the way, because the Chapter 49 page is one of the largest survivors. Closer to my desk, it’s barely discernible as paper at all. Just goop and pulp and—
Shit, are dogs allergic to ink? Do I need to be worried? What about paper? How much did she eat? Ninety percent of my internet searches these days are “can dogs eat…” followed by whatever she’s managed to ingest in that moment. So far, the list includes blueberries (yes, she can eat them), grapes (no, but apparently Athena has an ironclad digestive system or else there’s some critical dose, because she ate like half of one I dropped while I was making fruit salad and lived to tell the tale), sticks (ideally not), socks (also no), plastic bags (serious no), and the remains of one recently departed squirrel in the middle of the road (not recommended, but mostly because then I fell down a rabbit hole about the risks of rabies and distemper). I finally wound up paying for a twenty-four-hour virtual vet service I can call whenever she gets into something she shouldn’t. It’s not cheap, but it’s cheaper than biweekly visits to the emergency vet to have her stomach pumped.
When I got us a blue-eyed husky puppy at Christmas, I thought it would bring Gavin and me closer together. I thought we’d go snowshoeing through the forest and take walks across campus when the weather got warmer and go to farmer’s markets where we’d buy artisan cheeses for us and homemade, gluten-free dog biscuits for her.
I did not realize I was going to have to become a hobby canine nutritionist and spend time googling “best ways to get dog shit out of my carpet” while my sanity hung on by a thread.
Also, that within a year, Gavin would be out of the picture entirely, leaving me to grapple with the realities of being single and a dog dad and a million other questions by myself.
And now Athena’s eaten my book. All of it. I’d spent the last month and a half going through it, page by page, making painstaking handwritten notes for my next round of revisions in the margins. A few times I’d written out entirely new scenes on the backs of the pages. And it was all gone.
The trickling sound of water draws my attention just in time to see Athena peeing on the overturned Roomba as it whines in protest. A burning smell fills the room, and all I can do is slump to the ground, ignoring the way the mix of dog spit and paper pulp on the floor sticks to my jeans like glue.
