Excerpt: YTA

 (Here, our Keturah muses upon triumph, her first dog, and the fallacy of love. Stig is the third in a succession of grand dogs, or the fourth if you include the nameless childhood dog, a fool for whom he has no glad suffering. We promise that our next excerpt will include the notorious concept of burritos-for-Christmas and steer very clear of the kooky tanukis in Norwich, Ontario.)

Franz Schubert - Ständchen

We can see why Robert thought he was embarking on an improvement of his life. He may have had visions of certain sugarplums. The missus was dour and negative. On the other hand, we squealed when we walked into a Piggly-Wiggly and found ice-cream named after Billy Graham. 

“There was likely a time when the dour missus was as winsome, Keturah, but you know this. You’re right about the sugarplums and your part in conjuring them. You like triumph. Who doesn’t like triumph? The trick is to avoid cheap triumph. It’s not particularly grand to leap to triumph at the expense of someone else’s downfall, or to revel in schadenfreude. I’m guilty of this, even as I chastise you for going low instead of high in the Robert era. My own guilty triumph will live with me forever. I’ve enjoyed stories of your childhood dog, the nameless cur who hadn’t a loyal bone in his flea-bitten body. May God bless him over these many years, but cripes, what an easy triumph I’ve had over him!”

 

“We have never slanted this story with intent to slander the beast, Stig. The memory of the dog is pure and unvarnished. The first day, the last day – that’s all that matters. The rest is filler. We have no sense of who he was, or if he had anything remarkable about him. We liked the idea of a dog; that’s the reason why he came to live with us in the first place. We fed him, played with him, bored him silly. Ruth and Owny had their ideas concerning the dog’s passivity for everything except leaving. “Well, he wasn’t fixed,” Ruth explained. “We wanted him to be happy. He liked his gallivanting.” Sounds like a fail on all counts, there. And over time, we’ve met many a fine unfixed canine with charm, personality and, most importantly, loyalty. And – gallivanting? Why do people have to put a whimsical spin on every crass act that comes their way?”

 

“I cringe every time the topic of this beast’s refusal to exhibit the loyalty for which dogs are renowned. Tell me again so that I shudder anew.”

 

“He was neither quick nor slow to learn the basics of being a good canine citizen. To his credit, he didn’t seem to like Auld Owny, though he didn’t display overt hatred, either. To me, to Ruth – I suppose he tolerated us; he made it clear he’d rather be anywhere else except at GainesBurger time. And after a while, even that couldn’t pique his interest. He roamed for days, picking rot and fester from garbage cans, occasionally being arrested by the neighbourhood dog-catcher and held until we bailed him. As soon as he was home, he wailed to leave again. Ruth never resisted his whining. She opened the door and he sped away at top speed, again and again until Owny got the idea to tether him outside – either to teach him a lesson about whining indoors, or to satisfy him, we don’t know. When we returned from school and entered the back yard, the stake holding the chain was pulled up and both dog and chain were nowhere to be seen. The gate was still locked. He must have jumped over it, we thought. That takes a lot of determination, to f***ing leap over a picket-fence gate, chain, stake and all.”

 

“Was that the last time, the time he left for good? Remember, I know this story, but I get fuzzy on the details.”

 

“That’s because you are fuzzy. He never returned on his own, but he was returned to us a few more times after that. When school let out for the summer, we spent as much time with him as we could, thinking that he was simply lonely for our attention. 

 

Our presence irked him more than ever. His restlessness and whining hit fever pitch. He picked at his food. “A moody teenager,” said Ruth, causing twice the resentment. 

 

We saw her point, though, and hit our limit of tolerance. The whining, Stig! Long, drawn-out plaintive whimpers. We went with him outside in the late afternoon, and he stood at the edge of the front yard for a moment, before trotting away from us, to the east and down the long road that led to a valley and beyond that, an apartment complex. 

We watched him stop and turn around to look at us for a moment. We think we would have liked him and preserved a better memory if the conclusion had been different. But after that moment – it wasn’t even an extended moment of consideration, of eye-contact, or even of ambivalence – he turned back again and broke into a run. This time, he did not look back. We watched until his form grew smaller, and we could no longer see puffs of dust kick up from under his feet.

 

We walked back into the house and told Ruth we’d never see him again. 

“Sure, we will,” Ruth said, almost gaily. “If he takes too long in his cavorting, the dog catcher will nab him and we’ll be off to Canine Control to bring that rascal back.”

 

“He looked straight at me,” we said, “Before he took off for good. It was as though he was considering his options and thought, Nah, I’m blowing this popsicle stand. No hard feelings.”

 

That last part is a lie. We knew that Ruth was kidding herself to bring us both some comfort and hope. We’d be treading in YTA territory if we spoke out like that.

 

“It’s the truth, though,” says Stig, “Though I’m biased. I know dogs. I know curs, too, and unfortunately you got yourself stuck with a selfish form of the latter at a formative part of your life. That’s the reason why you have not been able to shake the profundity of his disloyalty to this day. I’ve rarely seen such a devolved beast, but they do exist.”

 

“Ruth refused to accept the cur’s abandonment. At first, she held out hope of his return. Well, so did we; each time we heard a sound outside  – the snap of a twig, a rustle of leaves, a car door’s slam – we jumped and held our breath. We half-expected our hunch of “gone for good” to be wrong, and that we would see his snout pressed against the screen door. 

 

But days turned to weeks, and then to months. Ruth grew bitter; she concocted wild stories to support the loyalty of a dog unloyal. “Someone took him,” she claimed. “That’s surely what happened. He was a handsome dog, a beautiful dog, and someone couldn’t resist taking him. I could see that the chain had been cut; some thief knew what he was doing.”

“But…” By this time, we were less indulgent of Ruth’s fantasy. AITA?  “You’re thinking of one of his earlier escapes. Even then, the chain wasn’t cut. The dog pulled up the stake and dragged it and the chain itself away in his haste to get free.”

 

Ruth would have none of this. 

 

“She never accepted that this dog had flown the coop for good, freely and of his own free will,”  sighed Stig. “She must have loved that thing.”

 

We never stopped to consider the concept of love. We have never believed in love, never will. As long as a situation, a relationship is working, is alive and well, then the notion of love is brought up as its foundation. Love is here to stay!  But, it’s not love, now, is it? It is a suspension of rational thinking, a willing departure into the sublime. And then, when the inevitable head of reality pokes through, we mourn something that was nothing but a great illusion.  We’re aware of the illusory nature of the thing we call love, but why weep for the loss of something that never existed? Is it the humiliation of being tricked that is painful?

And, does anyone need to hear this? Is it better to walk willingly into the path of the freight train that people believe is true love? Who are we to burst a bubble that will be burst soon enough, without our intervention? 

from YTA, the outrageous NaNoWriMo novel sensation of 2023