Canines by Jona Whipple
In her new creative nonfiction flash, “Canines,” Jona Whipple plunges the reader into a world where the line between human behavior and animal rage is not easily distinguished. Describing the girls who inhabit the young narrator’s world, Whipple writes, “In a group, they are dangerous, blood-hungry. Their leader steps forward for the first bite, opening the ritual, and then they rush in a wild fury to the feast, teeth flashing.” The title does double duty, centering imagery of teeth that are angry and uncared for, and the dogs, both real and symbolic, that threaten the narrator’s safety.
Whipple writes in her author’s note, “I relied so much on the dogs of my memory that they became a metaphor, and very nearly a character.” The dogs also provide an overarching theme, and act as a vivid conduit for telling a difficult story. Whipple deftly navigates the theme of animal aggression from the opening text, as one of her peers “bares” her teeth. Whipple summons the reader to witness her narrator’s strength in defiance of rage and despair; the narrator’s choices are not dissimilar to the choices made by the dogs that her abusive stepfather cared for: “They lower their heads in shame, he kicks and screams until he is tired, and at night they dig their holes again.” The visual and olfactory images (like the “gnarled traffic jam behind my lips” and the leather that “still smells rich and floral”) reinforce the theme. The author creates a world of brutish sight and smell.
In his Brevity craft essay, “‘Caught up in the Jaws’: Writing for Theme,” Aaron Gilbreath writes, “Themes expand the gaze of one person’s life—usually our protagonist’s—to reveal something larger about our culture, our times, or human relationships. Every story is about something more than its events.” The narrator lives in a world where a “parking lot gives way to basketball courts, broken sidewalks, miles of houses with broken siding, Confederate flags, gas stations, liquor stores.” But these are human terms, and human conventions. In “Canines,” the narrator, like her stepfather’s dogs, must learn to embrace the world with her teeth bared, and figure out how to fend for herself. —CRAFT
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch.
Jagged, asymmetrical, the bottom row marred by a large yellow-brown stain, thick as bone and nearly the size of the tooth itself. My teeth, fighting to be in the front of my mouth, ending up in a gnarled traffic jam behind my lips, are not the only shame I carry: my legs are pockmarked with tiny scabs, places chewed and scratched. My stepfather believes in dogs: in owning them, training them, punishing them, but not in treating them for fleas. I scratch all night and wake up in sheets dotted with smears of rust. The scabs break open when I move. I wet my finger in my mouth and spread the blood around until it thins, tinting the skin an orange crêpe in a perfect circle.
My stepfather is walking rot, teeth green at the edges. When he screams into my face, I smell the air rushing hot over those broken, decaying stumps, mossy rocks on the floor of a nightmare forest, hideous lichen creeping over them in the dark. He breathes his stench into my nose, leaning down into my orbit and stabbing his tipless fingers into my chest, driving his point into me. The tips are somewhere in the basement, dry in a pile of sawdust, sliced off in an accident with a table saw. His fingers are misshapen nubs, their irregular edges covered in layers of medicated ointment that leaves oily stains on my shirts.
At school, the girls circle, pawing at the dirt. They chew the insides of their mouths, snorting taunts. Fleabag, they say. Skank. Brush your nasty teeth. Alone, they are quiet, understanding, manageable. In a group, they are dangerous, blood-hungry. Their leader steps forward for the first bite, opening the ritual, and then they rush in a wild fury to the feast, teeth flashing.
Intensely loyal to one another, the pack works together to take down prey, ancient machinery operating flawlessly in the fine dust of the schoolyard.
He stands behind me, one hand gripping my chin to hold my head still, the other furiously scratching at my stained tooth with a new, stiff toothbrush. This wouldn’t be here if you’d brush your goddamned teeth, he says, and if you don’t start, I’ll get the wire brush from my toolbox and go after it with that.
We do this at night. The wiry stitches from his injured fingertips poking my cheek, my jaw aching from his grip, head bent back until my voice comes out like a bark, a gravel road. I spit blood and bits of my gums into the sink and we start again. He holds me still and digs at my stained tooth with the brush until there is enough blood, until he is satisfied.
For weeks, he forgets to care about the stain. I have other problems to correct: I eat too fast, I smell too bad. But then I open my mouth under the yellow kitchen light, and he remembers the shadow in my mouth. Attacks it with improvements.
I find the shoes looped and tied over a power line. I throw rocks, a basketball, until they unloop and fall to the ground, spraying my face with dry dirt. When they were new, they were the expensive kind, nicer than mine. They are three sizes bigger than my feet, and one of the corkscrew laces is broken, but the leather still smells rich and floral. With newspaper pushed down the back, my toes fill the tips, and the wide legs of my pants hide the obvious. I shuffle through the school doors because I can’t lift my feet.
Their sense of smell is sharp, capable of picking up a single bead of perspiration. They hunt me before they know I am there. They laugh before they know it is me.
The dogs dig pits in the gravel under the carport where they huddle down at night, their backs protected, and he comes out cursing, swinging his leg like a broom to kick the dust back to where he wants it. They hide with their heads low, watching, sitting in place on their tails unless he calls their names. There are four kinds of teeth in a dog’s mouth: those that nip and bite, those that shear, those that crush, and those that first warn, and then tear flesh. They never show him their teeth, never let out so much as a rumble of a growl, even though they can smell the meat of him through his fingertips. He shouts their names and they crawl to him, dragging in the dirt. They lower their heads in shame, he kicks and screams until he is tired, and at night they dig their holes again.
Time compounds my years by four and I am decades older than all of them when we turn eighteen, the age when the state says we are old enough to run free, to bite and scratch where we please. The girls will stay, trained in tradition and rooted in bone.
I wait where the parking lot gives way to basketball courts, broken sidewalks, miles of houses with broken siding, Confederate flags, gas stations, liquor stores. I pace the perimeter, push my face through the gates and smell the air, my mouth watering, and when they open, I am a burst of muscle, a howl: I disappear into the winds of the world and not even the sound of my name will call me back.
JONA WHIPPLE is a writer, librarian, and archivist, in that order. She is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction writing at the University of Missouri–Saint Louis. Her stories and essays have appeared in Chestnut Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Heavy Feather Review, Catapult, Hypertext, Bluestem, and others. She lives in Missouri, dangerously close to where she was born. Find her on Instagram @jonabologna.
Featured image by Justinas Teselis, courtesy of Unsplash.
