Milk Candy Review

We recently published Joanna Theiss’s beautiful “This is a Dog.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the relationship between the narrator and Brownie — there is a level of trust and love and familiarity, but at the same time, this underlying tension. The narrator chose Brownie because Brownie was the dog no one would choose. Do you think Brownie would have chosen the narrator in return?
If Brownie had been allowed to review the narrator’s résumé, I doubt she would have chosen her. The narrator has never owned a dog, has no idea how to train one, and feeds Brownie kettle corn! Most shelters vet potential dog owners more than Second Chances did in this story because they knew that Brownie was prone to biting, so they foisted her off on whoever would take her. Fortunately for Brownie, the narrator loves her immediately and wants to do right by her. She makes a place for Brownie in her home and, most importantly, provides tenderness and grace when Brownie makes mistakes. I like to think that Brownie recognizes she got a pretty good deal, in spite of the narrator’s lack of experience. 

2) And the ending! Oh, that ending! I adore how much the narrator reveals about themself and their belief in love. What will become of this pair, do you think? Or can you say?
It was love at first sight for the narrator, who cast off all of the perky lap dogs in favor of her. The narrator’s protectiveness kicked in when Brownie bit the neighbor, or possibly before, when she saw how the volunteer at Second Chances didn’t bother to advertise Brownie’s attributes. When Brownie gets sick, the narrator is willing to put her own body at risk to care for her. The love the narrator has for Brownie — and owners have for their dogs in general — is so pure: she loves Brownie regardless of whether Brownie reciprocates that love. In the last lines, the narrator is trying to understand how it might be for Brownie, who is not only an entirely different species than her, but who has also been abused and hasn’t encountered many loving humans. It’s a bittersweet feeling, and I’m glad it came across. 

Because this story is loosely based on a friend’s experience with a foster dog, I imagine a happy future for Brownie and the narrator. I like to think the seriousness of the bite makes the narrator realize she needs help training Brownie, and she finds a sympathetic veterinarian who will treat Brownie’s eye. Once they’re both healed, I imagine them watching crime procedurals and eating snacks (though maybe jerky strips for Brownie instead of kettle corn) for many years to come. 

This is how I get Brownie. A volunteer at Second Chances Animal Rescue offers me five different dogs: a cocker spaniel with missing teeth, a puppy that licks and grins and doesn’t know heartache, a chihuahua with a full-body tremble, a cowering terrier, a miniature poodle the same shade as gutter water.

These are those dogs’ names: Poppy, King, Trixie, Ella, Princess.

These are the ways the volunteer praises the dogs: doesn’t bark, good with kids, gets along with cats, doesn’t mind being alone, fits in your purse.

This is the volunteer, thinking she gets me.

This is me, walking away from those dogs and kneeling in front of a brown one with half an ear, a muscular chest and a wide stance, the dog whose name is the color of her fur. The dog who is staring into me as the volunteer says, “This one’s also up for adoption.”

No better than if she said, “This is a dog.”

*

This is Brownie and me watching reruns of “Law & Order: SVU” and eating kettle corn that clings to our teeth.

This is Brownie, leaning against the cushions like a little queen.

This is the scene when the kid stabs her abusive stepfather and this is when Brownie nods and her hazel eyes say, “Good girl.”

This is the yellow blankie that Brownie wears like a cape.

This is the dream she has when she paddles the air with her feet: she is swimming through a cold lake in summer while I toss her a ball that she catches, effortlessly, in her milky-pink mouth.

This is how Brownie brings each piece of kibble to my feet and eats only when I eat, this is how her body, snuggled under the covers, rumbles like an engine and shakes the mattress on its frame.

This is how Brownie enters my bloodstream like a virus, this is how she travels through my veins and pumps into my heart. This is how she burrows in.

*

This is Brownie, dozing lightly, square head on skinny paws.

This is the neighbor who stands too close and ignores my warnings.

This is Brownie, sinking her teeth into his thigh just as he says he’s very good with dogs.

This is the animal control officer explaining the law about dangerous animals: “In this state, a dog gets to bite once. If she bites twice, she goes bye-bye.”

This is Brownie, nosing the bright splatters of blood the neighbor left on my porch.

This is me, a woman who doesn’t know dogs, who assumes muzzles are cruel, and who figures Brownie must have seen something in the neighbor she didn’t like.

*

This is the morning when Brownie rubs her face on her blankie and makes a sound I haven’t heard before, like a growl interbred with a whine.

This is Brownie’s eye weeping a whitish fluid.

This is Brownie’s eye turning red and then swelling shut.

This is Brownie’s breakfast, untouched.

This is Brownie’s blankie, abandoned.

This is the internet, telling me she needs a vet to flush her eye, telling me that Brownie is hurting and needs painkillers, antibiotics.

This is me remembering the animal control officer and the one-bite rule.

This is me knowing there are no second chances for dogs like Brownie.

This is the washcloth that will clean Brownie’s crusty, angry eye, the care that will maybe keep Brownie out of a crowded waiting room, maybe keep her teeth out of a vet’s hand.

This is the washcloth touching down on Brownie’s face.

This is me, thinking I get her.

*

            This is the pain, not arriving all at once but trickling in slowly like water from a leaky faucet until the pain is a pool and I’m wading in it.

This is me, with a puncture in the meaty part of my hand, thinking I was doing the right thing picking the dog no one wanted, no one bothered to get to know, no one cared enough to give a name worth remembering.

This is the dog who crawls to me in a crouch, whose whimper comes from low in her belly. This is the dog’s way of apologizing, of wishing she could take it back, of explaining that she didn’t know love until me and she isn’t sure, even now, if it’s real.

But this. This is only a guess.

***

Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a lawyer-turned-writer living in Washington, DC. Her short stories and flash fiction have appeared in Peatsmoke, Bending Genres, The Florida Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fictive Dream, and Best Microfiction 2022. Links to her writing are available at www.joannatheiss.com.

This is how we unlearn the foreign body:

We pick up glass bottles with our bare hands. We pick up cardboard—soggy. We pick up old takoyaki boxes, slick with grease, and splintered chopsticks stained with brown sauce. We pick up tea-stained newspapers and place bets on how much the tea and paper cost. We pick up charred wood, pick up used rags. We pick up Coca-Cola cans, their cold kiss on our fingers supplanting the nonexistent fizz in our throats. We pick up the flecks of spit that fly from our lips when we make our rounds, chanting kuzui oharai, kuzui oharai. We pick up the ju sounds that flick from our foreign mouths and twist them into a natural zu. We pick up grocery bags: cloth and plastic. We pick up Olympus Pen cameras. We pick up shoes without the laces. We pick up laces without the shoes. We pick up babies’ shoes, clearly worn, and scraps of clothing with too many holes to take home to our sisters. We pick up boxes of Hi-Lite cigarettes—empty, of course. We pick up Orion’s Cocoa Cigarette boxes (“we support your non-smoking”). We pick up Pinky Chicks albums. We pick up movie posters for Immortal Love and Go, Go, Second Time Virgin. We pick up old leather belts, the kind with the brass buckles. We pick up our mothers’ voices, the ones that say come home quickly instead of don’t forget to buy fish. We pick up snow shovels with jagged tears in the soft red plastic. We pick up see-through plastic PET bottles. We pick up the shrill screams of children at the park, half a block away, and the excited pulse of their running footfalls. We pick up the votes our fathers wanted to cast and stow them in our pockets. We pick up used Pilot ballpoint pens and all the words that drained out of them. We pick up how to recycle. This is how we recycle. We recycle. Recycle.

***

Rina Olsen, a rising high school junior from Guam, is the author of Third Moon Passing (Atmosphere Press, June 2023). She edits for Polyphony Lit, Blue Flame Review, and Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, and she was invited to be an instructor for Polyphony Lit’s Summer 2023 writing workshop Around the World of Poetry in 80 Days. Her work has been recognized by the John Locke Institute, the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, the Sejong Cultural Society, and Guam History Day, and her most recent writing has either appeared in or is forthcoming in The Round, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Sophon Lit. Visit her at her website: https://rinaolsen.com.

We recently published Francesca Leader’s powerful “Let Me Try To Make It Interesting.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) “Let me try to make it interesting,” our narrator tells us, but she could also be saying “let me tell this story in a way I can bear to tell it. Let me share this story the way it could have happened instead.” Do you think it would be harder for her to tell her story in a way that wasn’t “interesting”?
That might well be the case, but it wasn’t what I had in mind. I actually started writing this piece as a subversion of “strangeness for its own sake,” which I think results from using surrealism/irrealism solely to add charm or novelty. I think this approach can render a piece of writing lifeless. I tend to write realism because I feel best able to convey emotion that way. To my own surprise, as I was writing this piece, I noticed the metaphors taking on a life of their own, and telling a story of trauma in a way that felt authentic to me. By the end of it, I thought the story really was more interesting told this way, as a sort of parable, than it would have been if narrated realistically.

2) And at the end, we learn the “real story.” One of escape and freedom and inner strength. Will our narrator keep telling variations of this (her?) story throughout her life? Or is she ready to move on to a new story?
I do see the narrator leaving this story behind and moving on to a new one. However, I don’t think this means she’s on an “onward and upward” trajectory, never to repeat the same mistakes. I don’t think understanding who she is and what she deserves will necessarily save her from being ensnared or hurt again. It will, however, empower her to more quickly and easily liberate herself the next time. 

CW: Sexual assault

I know the real story would bore you, so let me try to make it interesting. Instead of saying I was molested at eleven, I’ll say a boy with laser-red eyes opened a rat cage in his grandmother’s cellar, and the rats ran all over me, nipping and scratching my skin until I had none left, and when my skin grew back it was transparent and permeable as water. Instead of saying I was assaulted at nineteen, I’ll say I awoke one night to discover my tangled bedsheets had become boa constrictor coils, and the harder I fought, the tighter they squeezed, and I survived only by breathing the thin straw of moonlight between the curtains until the first rays of sunrise shot through, turning the vampire boa to dust, which my waterlike skin soaked up hungrily, hardening and scaling a bit as a result, but remaining transparent. Instead of saying I surrendered my whole being, at twenty-five, to a man who was also a boy—the same kind of boy who’d molested me, the same kind of man who’d assaulted me—I’ll say I walked naked and barefoot into the wilderness, believing I wouldn’t be hurt if I gave myself willingly this time. But the beast I met wasn’t a rat, nor a snake, nor a lion, nor a bear, nor any cutting or strangling creature, but a handsome-faced, limpid-eyed parasite who pushed his way down the slippery slide of my throat and opened up inside me, flattening my essence against my body’s walls until it bonded to the bone-and-blood bricks, until I was little more than a container in which the beast could hide himself, looking out with my eyes, smiling with my lips, speaking his words with my voice. I’ll say it was years before I realized what was happening. I’ll say that just before the parasite absorbed the last remnants of my self, just before he discarded my useless husk to move on to a fresh host, I began, with my mind, to tell him “no”—just “no”—and didn’t stop telling him “no” until, repulsed by the newly-bitter taste of my atoms, he shrank up and withdrew, and my skin grew back as it had been in early childhood—fresh and soft, but opaque and strong, providing a safe home for my heart, my soul, and my secrets. The real story is that I’m here. The real story is that I’m free. The real story is that I’ve learned—finally—the difference between being loved and being consumed.

***

Francesca Leader is a self-taught, Pushcart-nominated writer originally from Western Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Wigleaf, Fictive Dream, Barren, the J Journal, Bending Genres, JMWW, Drunk Monkeys, Bright Flash, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.)

Mr. Z

Back in high school, persuasive writing class. The assignments were flimsy, a waste of time. Who should be the next president? What’s the most useful college major? I wrote an essay arguing against apologies. Apologies are the most selfish form of persuasion, I wrote. I put in little effort beyond that point. In that class, I broke pencils against the desk and dreamt of a big future where doodles had no place on my hands.

Assistant Professor J. Mittleman

Last month, I skimmed some study that explained why, on average, gay boys do best in school. When I showed the study to my husband, he said, “Yeah, you did stay in the closet way longer than me.”

Mrs. F

In third grade, I tried hard. We wrote short stories. I wrote of a jungle, a gorilla, a trapper. My gorilla knew Swahili and English and had manicured nails. I cried when writing of his fall over that mossy cliff; he was pushed. Dad and I revised the story for six hours, the longest I’d ever sat with an assignment. My grade: E for Excellence. Mrs. Fritz submitted my story to a statewide writing competition, which Lydia Davis won. I was expecting my story to appear in a book. Life was moving too slow for me.

Mrs. Y

Now when I help my daughter with her homework, I mourn the years when I neglected and discouraged my brain. My daughter is in fourth grade. She is the fastest at division in her class.

Puzzle Master W. Shortz

My coworker and I used to do crossword puzzles on the bus home from work. She had a quick brain, or quick compared to mine. While we filled in answers, her brain sat on top of my soggy one, getting higher, peering over the fence at the world.

Mrs. P, Mr. T, Mr. N

There was that time in tenth grade when I let Jen cheat off of my chemistry test because I’d already cheated off of Sam’s. There was that time I aced an English test because I’d read To Kill a Mockingbird back when I was eight years. There was that time I convinced myself to be curious about chi-squares and bell curves. There were those months I brought an empty backpack to school. So light and floppy.

Judge K

In jury duty fifteen years ago, I was thirsty. I asked the bailiff for orange juice, no pulp. We were told of the woman who cut off her boyfriend’s toes. Like most, I made excuses to be dismissed. “Knives have a mind of their own,” I said. I said, “Knives are notoriously hard to wield.” I must’ve been less convincing than the other slippery people there because the judge told me to stand up. “You’re not taking this seriously,” he said; “Write me a five-thousand word essay on the importance of jury duty and leave.” “That’s not how this works,” I said. But he held out a pen and legal pad for me. After sulking, I wrote how the court could improve its image. I was unsure how to best craft my argument.

Mr. K

Before my daughter was born, I signed up for woodworking lessons and made her a crib. Working with my hands barely tamed my fears of fatherhood. But the geometry helped soothe me. I carved repeating triquetras on the planks of the crib. I felt so smart, so superior, explaining vesicae piscis lens shapes to my husband. It takes great effort now to keep the information from slipping out of my head.

HMS, HSS, UMass Amherst

In middle school, in high school, in college, I promised myself to start trying hard whenever the assignments began to feel real.

Mrs. L

My husband and I have a meeting with our daughter’s elementary school guidance counselor. She hands us a blank form to fill out with the extracurriculars we wish her to take. My husband suggests gymnastics and Spanish. “Yes, Spanish,” I say, “and German. Mandarin. French. Chess club. Math club. Student government. More?” My husband writes down some of these. I accept his revisions to my list. And at home, I look at my daughter. For social studies, she’s writing down amendments she’d like to add to the Bill of Rights. She is taking herself so seriously. I take her so seriously. I read over her list and speak to her as if I’m a person who knows how to think. 

***

Max Kruger-Dull holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Litro Magazine, Roanoke Review, Quarterly West, The MacGuffin, Hunger Mountain Review, and others. He lives in New York with his boyfriend and two dogs. For more, please visit maxkrugerdull.com.

The summer our parents threw the word divorce like it was a dart—puncturing the hell out of their target, but always just missing the bullseye—we spent our days in the woods. This was before extinction meant anything other than trilobites and saber-toothed cats. The woods seemed to us then anything but delicate. We poked sticks into holes, hoping to rouse whatever lurked inside. We practiced standing still as rabbits until we believed we could become invisible if we needed to. We believed we might need to. We picked and ate blackberries, so plump and so sweet, straight from their prickly vines. Sometimes we plucked them pale pink, even though the pinks were more bitter than sweet, much too hard to bite through. We rolled those unripe berries around in our mouths, imagining they were somebody’s brains—not so much like we were eating them but like we were keeping them safe there in the dark of our mouths. Something soothing in it. We named the banana spider whose gigantic web stretched between two scraggly oaks Charlotte. We stopped to ask what she caught in the night. We inspected the entombed bodies strung from her pantry like ornaments—always placid and stiff, until one dewy morning, a fresh catch, still heaving in and out with desperate breaths. Impossible to tell what was trapped underneath all that white gauze. We watched the victim’s dwindling breaths for longer than we’d watched anything in our lives, except television. We felt we were seeing something secret. We felt excited, but also guilty for feeling excited. We whispered of bringing our mother’s tiny hangnail scissors into the woods to cut the victim free. Imagined snipping the tight, gossamer threads of bondage. But we never did go get those tiny scissors. We didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to miss a thing. Also, we feared the operation wouldn’t go smoothly. It was one thing to watch a thing die but another entirely to kill it with your own unsteady hand.

***

Michelle Ross is the author of There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award (2017), Shapeshifting, winner of the Stillhouse Press 2020 Short Fiction Prize (November 2021), and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (April 2022). She is an editor at 100 Word Story. More can be found at www.michellenross.com.