Fiction by EJ Green
AFTERPARTY

I’m buying cigarettes and a scratch-off ticket at Wawa when the dog starts following me. I don’t know the dog, but the dog assumes it knows me, because it sticks its nose against my pocket and wags its tail. 

“Is this somebody’s?” I ask in a meek voice, because making an announcement in a Philly Wawa at 10:00 p.m. was not in the plans tonight. 

No one answers. I leave the store and the dog darts out beside me, and it is there that I notice it has no collar. It isn’t mangy or flea-ridden as far as I can tell. It just looks cold and lonely. In the dog’s large brown eyes, I see overflowing pools of want. For what I don’t know. Kneeling down and seeing the lights of Broad Street reflect there, I can almost see myself. A faceless shadow. 

Some kind of retriever mix, I assume, which is strange for a stray out here where most wandering dogs will be pit bulls. Girl or boy, I’m not sure, but I decide girl. Not knowing exactly what to do, and not the kind of person to trust authority when it comes to such matters, any matters really, I light a cigarette and start walking toward the subway. The dog follows me. I stop and turn toward her, and she stops, like we are in some comical ’80s movie about a broken human who comes upon a dog that the human must save but in the end who is really saved? 

“I am not your ’80s movie human,” I say to her. She sits and stares at me. 

The subway entrance smells like piss, even in the bright, cutting cold of February. Jamming my mostly finished cigarette into a receptacle I carry with me because even though I abuse myself I will not abuse this city, I say bye to the dog and walk through the graffiti-laden entrance and down the echoing stairs. A man’s melodic but stark voice bounces off the walls as I draw closer. I can feel February in his lungs. A longing to hit fast forward into a kinder season. I pass him and though I don’t make eye contact with the subway musician, we share a moment of solidarity. 

Smoking is new to me, and though I hate it, it gives me something else to focus on besides drinking. Smoking is deadlier, I think, but it’s more acceptable at seven in the morning. The kind of thing you can do on your brief but psychologically medicinal Starbucks breaks when you contemplate, and then go to your phone so you stop contemplating. 

Cigarettes make it so I don’t smell like coffee all the time. They give me an excuse to step outside and satisfy my burgeoning addiction, which is supported wholeheartedly by my Camel-obsessed manager, who likes me because I came in with more experience than the other baristas. 

“Excuse me, miss! Ma’am! Ma’am!”

Someone is doing something bad. Maybe pissing in a corner or shooting up. Head down, I pass through the turnstiles and wonder if the word is turn-stile or turns-tile? The SEPTA agent is still yelling as the train roars into the station, but her voice is swallowed whole by the mechanical serpent. Only when I slide into one of the seats do I realize the dog has followed me and now sits at my knee, staring, waiting. Moments like this make me believe in past lives. Inexplicable connections we can’t ignore. Why do we gravitate toward certain beings and why do we pull away from others? The SEPTA agent was yelling at me, of course, thinking I willfully led the dog onto the train. 

Dogs are not allowed on trains, but so isn’t shooting up and peeing, and I never see anyone getting in the way of that. I wonder if I pet the dog, will she snap at me? I ball my hand into a fist like I’ve been taught and let her sniff it. She lowers her head, and my hand opens upon her golden hair. Coarser than I had anticipated, but not as dirty with city grit. She nuzzles at my pocket, and I pull out the contents. An unfinished stick of beef jerky wrapped in plastic because halfway through eating it I wondered if I should try to be vegan. A scratch-off ticket purchased on a whim. No, lies. Because I was in an existential mood. Lint. I slip the ticket back into my pocket and peel away the plastic to present the salty strip. This is when I realize that it wasn’t me that drew her but the beef jerky. There are no past lives, but there is the incredibly powerful canine olfactory sense. Gently, she takes the nitrate-heavy stick with her front teeth, her eyes on me, and tosses it deeper into her mouth. When she is done, her tail wags. For so long I’ve focused on the negative aspects of cause and effect. Smoking and tossing a cigarette butt down a drainpipe that feeds the river. Destroying your liver before you’re out of your twenties. Dating an alcoholic juggernaut who encourages liver destruction, and consequently worrying your family and friends. But this is different. This doesn’t make me cringe. 

“I have nothing more for you,” I announce. She rests her head on my knee and looks up with enormous brown eyes. I have always been a cat person, but I think I am falling in love. 

My friends have dictated that I am supposed to distract myself by going to a party tonight at their apartment on Pine Street. As I get to my stop and emerge street level, I am stared at by amused commuters, and shouted at by another SEPTA employee. It’s all my fault that the dog is following me, as if it isn’t her will alone that is creating this powerful connective force.  

Before I broke up with my boyfriend Karl he spontaneously attacked a scarecrow at an autumn festival that unfortunately served beer, and made a fool of himself and me in front of dozens of strangers and many of our friends. He thought he was being funny, but he was horrifying. More horrifying still: I was to go home with him that night. Deal with his belligerence, then nurse his moaning and groaning ass to bed like some selfless war-time nurse. I followed Karl unquestioningly for so long that the abnormality of his behavior began to feel normal. His drunkenness wasn’t just amusing or terrifying. It was both at the same time. How I reacted to his behavior set the mood for an entire day, so in this way, being with him was like living on a chess board. One wrong move and you were fucked. He never hit me, but he spit and screamed in my face the way my mother did when I was a kid. As much as I hated the terror, it also felt like destiny, like a coming home of sorts. This is the behavior of people who love each other.

The dog must still be hungry because as we walk she sniffs the sidewalk and occasionally snatches mysterious detritus and eats it. All the bars are bursting, and car tires roll along the cobblestone streets creating a percussive score to a strange evening. I have nothing really to offer this dog, and yet she still follows me, perhaps spurred by a hope that there will be more to this. After all, I had given her a shred of what could be in the form of a beef jerky strip. Hope is like a drug. 

I decide to call her Goldie. It’s an obvious, unimaginative name, but it suits her to have a name thought up in a flash. Everything Goldie does is instinctual, thoughtless, and therefore kind of wonderful. She doesn’t ruminate about her life, but instead jumps from one opportunity to the next. I wonder who or what she will choose after me. Likely a garbage truck. She will get a sniff of old deli meats and make a break for it and that golden streak of enthusiasm will be gone from my life. 

A small pang of worry grinds over my heart. 

We cross the street and I take inventory of my friends—who is allergic, who doesn’t like being around dogs. Would the host just say no, and would that mark the end of our short-lived relationship? I would walk through that door, closing it in Goldie’s face, demoting her to waiting in the apartment hallway or taking to the streets, newly alone. 

Regret pokes me like a needle, and I realize it is possible to feel regret for a thing that hasn’t yet happened. 

Karl and I met at a bar, of course. I was shooting pool, and he was playing darts nearby. One of the darts he threw bounced off the wall and landed at my feet, and I handed it to him. He asked me to join him and his friends, and I did. Looking back, they all seemed a little nervous around him. I should have clocked it then, but I was feeling vulnerable that night and in need of approval. We were together for five years before he got down on one knee. I said yes, and then no a few hours later. The blowup was atomic. How was I going to financially support myself without him? I would definitely die alone and unloved. Everyone is going to hate me for this, especially my nieces who adore him. As he screamed, one word kept playing in my head: without. Now I am without. Five years wasted because I was too scared to be without. 

I stayed quiet throughout the tirade, hoping he’d just wear himself out, and he did. He walked out that night after shaking the cabinet that held my great-aunt’s eighty-year-old China, breaking nearly everything. I took what wasn’t broken, packed my things, and blocked him, never speaking to him again. If I’m being honest with myself, the moment he took the dart from my outstretched hand, I was already in regret mode. There was something wild in his eyes. And pained. 

No matter how carefully you tear, there are always ragged edges. This wasn’t careful, so in our wake we left a wasteland of pain. Our friends took sides, and the result was that our social group snapped in two. The world got smaller and bigger all at once. But also safer. Quieter. 

I cross Walnut Street and tell Goldie, “I think Heather is allergic to dogs. But it might be dust mites. You might be okay.” I glance down but no longer see her at my side. A wave of panic hits me, and I look across the street just in time to see a flash of gold slip through a closing door at the Curtis Center. 

I rush across the street after her, ready to apologize for her presence to the guards inside. The apology curls around my tongue as deftly as a gymnast propelling onto a bar. So much of my exhaustive energy being with Karl was apologizing for his actions. I expect that feeling this way again, even for Goldie, would taste rancid. But it doesn’t. 

The party was supposed to get my mind off things. Not think about Karl, what happened to him, but when death takes people away, they become ubiquitous. Somehow I always knew he would die young and in an accident, but I never thought it would come quite so quickly and that it would feel so close. A man falls off a trail in Hawaii and he might as well have fallen from the clouds and landed right on top of you as you suck a Camel on your Starbucks smoke break. 

“Am I supposed to cry?” I asked my manager after showing her the text from one of my former friends. I wasn’t being flippant; I honestly didn’t know. Because I felt like crying, but I also felt relieved, and also mournful for the person he never got to become because he couldn’t ever get out of his own way. She knew about Karl, all the dirty details. Grinding her cigarette onto the dumpster’s lid, she reached her arms out and pulled me in, telling me with her sweet and bitter breath that there isn’t anything I’m supposed to do. Nothing at all. 

In the shining, pristine lobby, Goldie is nowhere to be seen. A guard sits at the far end of the room, and I jog over to her. She looks up from her desk with tired eyes. 

“Hi, have you seen a dog come through here?”

“No, I have not,” she says, deadpan. 

“Can I look for her?”

She glances left to right. “It’s your dog.”

“It’s not my dog.”

She furrows her brow. I thank her, and shuffle to the center of the lobby, unsure of where to go from here. The Curtis Center is foreign to me, a place for people of a different tax bracket. I don’t even really know what its function is besides being pretty. On the other end of the lobby, a darkened room surrounded by glass thrums with pumping music. It smells like hamburgers.

Inside, the music is so loud that I can feel an expanding and contracting in my brain like another heartbeat. A flash of white crinoline at the bar, surrounded by Caribbean blue dresses, and I know this is a wedding afterparty. Others mill in black trousers and tucked-in oxfords with suspenders, sweaty foreheads, and laughter that bisects the music and batters the eardrums. Sleeves rolled up revealing sharp elbows. Stilettos replaced by sneakers. I am transfixed at the hostess stand, looking into a future that I ran screaming from. 

The hostess walks up to me and rests her hand on a sign that I hadn’t yet noticed. “This section is closed, but you can sit on the other side.”

“Did you see a dog come through here?”

“Oh,” she says, surprised. “No.”

I give the wedding party one more glance before I see a shock of golden tail, like wheat on a windy day. 

“I see her,” I say, circling the stand and making a beeline toward the party, who has also noticed Goldie. Everyone is welcoming to her, if not a little stunned by her presence. Cooing questions like: Where did you come from? Who do you belong to? Where’s your collar? fight the cacophonous music. 

“Hey, sorry,” I say, pushing through as politely as possible. “That’s my dog.”

“Where’s his collar?” the bride asks. 

“It fell off,” I lie. “I’ve been trying to get her back.”

“Oh, it’s a girl.”

“I think so,” I admit. 

The bride gives me a once over. The party continues to pet Goldie, and she soaks it in, head tilted up, mouth open, tongue out. 

“Can I give her some of my burger?” a guy asks. I turn to him and for a brief moment, feel like I’m falling from a great distance. He is tall, blonde, with a sharp face and small eyes. He looks nothing like Karl, but it doesn’t matter because the resemblance lives in his energy, his very essence. He is a Karl kind of drunk. 

“Sure,” I manage.

The bride throws her arm around him as he feeds Goldie from the palm of his hand. She scarfs it up, tail wagging. 

The party invites me to continue hanging, and I agree but only for a few minutes. Besides, Goldie is loving the attention. When the hostess comes over to announce that dogs aren’t allowed, most of the wedding party lets out a symphony of groans. No one is more upset than the groom, who rests both hands on the hostess’s shoulders and leans in slightly to emphasize his point, which erupts from his mouth with spittle and slurred words. I recognize the look in her eyes: The plight of the worker who isn’t paid enough to deal with bullshit. 

“We’ll go,” I say, eager to diffuse this. “It’s not a problem.”

“Yes, it is,” the groom says. “It’s our special goddamn day.” 

The bride steps in and if I recognized the look on the hostess, I really recognize this. A careful expression reminiscent of walking barefoot across broken glass. On the other side of him, she places her hand gently and reiterates that it’s okay, and Goldie and I really should leave, and that we don’t have to make a big deal out of it, and that everything is going so well tonight. 

He looks around, confused and angry, and hangs his head in defeat. It’s a red herring. I know this, and so does the bride. Every belligerent drunk is the same, just like every happy drunk. The groom drops his hands from the hostess and turns to Goldie with a renewed, tornado-like energy, rubbing all down her back, sticking his face in hers, and losing balance and falling back against an empty chair that whines as it slides across the floor. He is on his ass, and Goldie is wagging her tail and barking, and the groom is barking back, and the bride looks like she’s about to cry. 

I don’t have answers. I am not the kind of person who should give advice, ever. But I see an open door and slip through, gently touching the bride’s arm and stepping a little closer while the groom is busy with Goldie, while he makes a scene on the floor like a five-year-old. 

“You don’t have to put up with this if you don’t want to.”

She turns to me, wide-eyed. For a moment I think she’s experiencing an epiphany. In my fantasy she is wrapping her arms around me, thanking me for being more of a friend to her than any of her bridesmaids, and calling off the marriage right then and there. 

But then her expression twists, sours, and her hands find her hips. “What the fuck did you just say?”

“Nothing.” I shrink back against the bar. 

“You think you know me? You think you know us?”

“No, of course not.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“No one.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, pushing past her. “Forget it, I’m sorry.” I reach my hands out to Goldie, but she’s so preoccupied with the groom that my pets, claps and calls do nothing. I look around as the bride continues to yell at me, as the wedding party begins to understand that I have somehow pissed her off and am now relegated to pariah. Not the drunk man-baby on the floor.

On the bar is a half-eaten plate of nachos. Not a great option, but it’s something. I take it and shove it under Goldie’s nose, and the groom in his oblivious drunkenness hits it with his hands, spilling some of the chips and ground meat bits and beans. This seems to work, and Goldie now turns toward the mess on the floor. She scarfs it up in under five seconds and sniffing for more, notices my plate and begins to walk toward me. I back away with it, toward the doors. 

“She’s taking our food!” somebody yells.

“Who cares,” someone else mutters. 

“Goldie, come back!” the groom calls, now entirely supine. “Can I keep her?”

“She’s mine,” I yell.

As I shuffle out the door butt first, Goldie in tow, I catch one last glimpse of the bride, who stands over her groom, arms crossed, her face unreadable. 

The hostess watches us go, mouth hung open. I apologize to her, and the door swings shut. 

The night air is a knife, but it’s preferable to that shitshow. I let Goldie eat nearly all of what’s on the plate, reserving some of the ground meat in my coat pocket in case she tries to run off again. Because I don’t want her to run off again. Instead, I want to keep seeing her happy, carefree face tonight. And tomorrow, and maybe even the next day. Maybe I’ll find her owners, glance a sign in passing with her picture on it. If I do, I’ll call the number, but I hope that never happens. What I hope is that Goldie is as without as I am.

Being with Karl meant never defending myself, and I’m not sure I’m ready to do that. But I would do it for Goldie, and maybe that’s a start. 

On the way to the party, we stop at the park for a minute, because even though it’s cold, I need stillness. Among the meat bits I find the scratch-off, which I pull out and examine under the park’s floodlight. I don’t have any coins, so I pull a quarter from the empty fountain, which has to be bad luck, especially if used to scratch a lotto ticket. Goldie watches me work as I remove the silver coating to reveal a series of numbers. I read the card and show it to Goldie, who sniffs it before sitting back and staring at me, tongue out. I won two dollars, only enough to buy a second chance, but in this moment I am rich.  

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #53.

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