Matt Barrett
Two months after we had our first child, our dog asked if he could speak to us. Upstairs, our daughter slept in her bassinet, our dog’s ears rising every time she stirred. They’d gotten off to a rocky start. The day we brought her home, she cried, our dog howled, and we laughed as we took their picture, the two of them with their mouths open, captioning it for our families to see: BFFs already. They’re singing together, we said. When she woke up at 1:00 am (then 3:00, then 4:00), our dog slunk into another room. But our house was small, and her cries were mighty, and in the morning, when it was time to take a walk, we chose to sleep instead. We told him, “Maybe this afternoon,” but the afternoon came, and our daughter was hungry, and what did we know about balance when something so small and brand new was the heaviest thing we held?
He sat between us on the couch, his head down, as if unsure how much to say. Upstairs, the bassinet creaked. He chose his words carefully but knew we might have to run.
“Was I not enough?” he asked.
He was a basset hound with long ears and short legs, a thick body and skinny tail, as if every part of him were designed for something else. When our daughter slept longer than normal, we called her a bassinet hound. Her big head and skinny neck, her body equally disproportioned.
Our dog didn’t like the comparison.
“You’ve always been enough,” we said.
“Then why’d you have her?”
He looked at us with sad, doughy eyes—eyes that were sad and doughy even when he was happy. On the end table, his leash lay neatly coiled. He’d stopped bothering to nudge it with his nose.
He was almost twelve years old. The brown around his eyes had faded to grays; his hind legs wavered when he stood. We’d spent hours posing him for pictures with our daughter, as if the only way we’d remember their lives once overlapped was having piles of proof to be sure.
“Does she make you happy?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“You don’t seem any happier.”
No. We seemed more tired, disorganized, too easily annoyed. But wasn’t that what love looked like sometimes? The baggy eyes, the cloudy minds. A rite of passage for parents like us.
We’d made jokes about animal parents—how easy some of them had it. A horse is born, and it starts running. Turtles hatch, and they crawl to the sea. A thousand little seahorses emerge, and if the dad feels like eating a few, what’s going to stop him?
There’s no laying eggs in the human world. No nudging your newborn and watching her stand. Would any of this make sense to a dog? That of course this stage might not look like joy. For the first few months, humans kind of suck at living.
We ran our fingers through his fur, avoiding the old man bumps on his belly, careful not to touch the parts that had aged, as if our hands alone might break him. We did this with our daughter, too, holding her head but not the soft spots, balancing our wish to comfort her without applying too much pressure. We were torn between the desire to hold them, envelop them, squeeze them with all our love and the knowledge that we also had the power to hurt.
Our dog curled in between us, resting his head on one of our thighs, his ears lowered, tail tucked beneath his legs. What we wouldn’t have done to explain these things—to sit him down and actually have this conversation. But for now, maybe what mattered was that he laid there, his nose burrowed into our thighs, his eyes slowly starting to close. And in the quiet of our house, we felt his chest beginning to rise, a steady, soothing rhythm, reminding us to breathe.
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Matt Barrett holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro and teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, West Branch, Pithead Chapel, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions, among others.