On Tuesday we drove to pick up Mom from the pound. I made her a cozy spot in the back seat—with blankets and her pillow with the mascara stain. I filled her water bottle with extra ice and put that in the car, too. I thought she might be thirsty. She had been wandering for a few days before someone spotted her begging for scraps outside of a Starbucks.

She had disappeared on the 4th of July, after the fireworks and after our father had too much to drink and after he called her a bitch. Mom was chipped, so they were able to call us as soon as she got there. “Good samaritans”—the boy from the pound said—“brought her in, but she tried to bite them. We didn’t think she belonged to anybody on account of how wild she was actin’.” 

That didn’t sound like our mom, the woman who used to make sure we brushed our teeth every morning before school. Surely he had mistaken her with someone else and ours was still out there—at a resort, a spa I hoped. It had to be someone else. “The chip doesn’t lie, ma’am,” the boy said. Then he asked us, “How long has she been emaciated?”

I thought about Grandma telling her things like, “What’s your secret?” Our aunt saying, “Girl, I wish I was as dedicated as you. You look hot!”       

When we got to the pound, the boy at the desk said he’d walk us back. He was a teenager, close to my age. On another occasion I might have called him cute—and Mom would have encouraged me to talk to him. I must have been staring because he looked at me then and said, “Don’t worry, this is normal. Smart getting her chipped, though. We get so many we have to euthanize after three days. Really a shame when families come in and we have to tell them they were too late.” 

As we walked down the hall, some of the moms excitedly pressed their faces against the cage, hoping for some bit of praise, affection. Other moms cowered in the back corner, facing away. They tucked their bottoms in and held their legs tight. Some of them scratched their heads with their toenails in an incredible display of flexibility and poor hygiene. “Molly, Molly, where are you?” Dad called out in a sweet, practiced voice. We heard whimpers, but they were voices we didn’t recognize, though they all had the same inflection.                        

When we got to Mom’s kennel, her long black hair was in patches. She was facing away from us, but I recognized the blue cami she was wearing, the one I saw her in last. She was bent over her knees—I could see her vertebrae stacked, prominent. She turned her head to look back, but the muzzle hid half her face, and I couldn’t tell if she was happy to see us. “Yep, sorry, we gotta do that to the biters,” the boy said as he pressed his key into the lock and jostled open the kennel door. 

He handed us a leash to slip around Mom’s neck—to safely walk her to the car so she wouldn’t get spooked by the other moms, and whatever it was they were whispering to each other. I held the loop in my hands, ran my fingers along the coarse, rigid fibers. She looked up at me from the edge of her muzzle with strange, dilated eyes—like she knew something I didn’t, like she was telling me to close the cage.

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Chey Dugan attended the 2024 summer Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been recognized as a finalist in fiction from The Adroit Journal, Southeast Review, The Plentitudes Journal, Cult Magazine, and Midway Review. She was awarded the 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly and elsewhere. Chey lives in Albuquerque with her family.