CW: death, animal death
what i remember most is how the sub-zero night turned your fur to shattering needles that poked holes in my gloves as i wrenched you from the doghouse floor, and how your body—i had to literally break it to get it free—sounded just like anything else frozen, like leaves unraked in a sudden october snow, crystalized, splintering under my boot, or a shovel on a sidewalk, or an ice machine, or a… before i moved you, i took your picture for evidence; you were lying on your side as if sleeping, as if you hadn’t suffered although i knew you had, and you reminded me of the boy i knew in school who left my room one night in january, steamy and stumbling the wrong way home after a kiss in the doorway, so wet my face froze when he pulled away, and when he never texted, i went out looking until i found him the next morning curled up in the snow under a shimmering pine tree, as if he hadn’t suffered either.
Vic Nogay writes to explore her traumas, misremembrances, and Ohio, where she is from. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Versification, Anti-Heroin Chic, (mac)ro(mic), Ellipsis, and other journals. Twitter: @vicnogay. Read: linktr.ee/vicnogay.