Dog God

[evieshka]

I. Misnomer

A girl is walking a god.


II. Correction

A girl is walking a dog, and in recounting her story, she writes 'god' instead of 'dog' and doesn't immediately spot the problem.

The dog isn't her god any more than it is her dog, so the word used to describe the entity at the end of its leash doesn't particularly matter.

(But the error was probably more cognitive than relational.)

Also an error, more relational than cognitive but also cognitive: the girl may not be a girl.

She is late-thirties and the noun 'woman' causes her distress. When an accusation flung in a post-nightmare sobbing midnight alerted her to the fact that she is 'a grown woman', she stalled out of what was previously distressing her,
searched her hindbrain for the appropriate relational cue.
She could find no file detailing her gender cognitively, cross-referenced its relation to her breasts, and found this particular subject had not been researched before it was peer-reviewed.

(This is the crux of the autigender phenomenon: non-association of one's performance of gender with one's sex, particular to those with atypical neurology.)

She has not researched her gender. She did not prepare for the role.

She had not been performing 'woman'.

She is not performing 'woman' now; she is walking a dog.

She uses 'she', and so the narrative uses 'she', because a word does not make her what she is not.

Dog. God. Woman. She.



III. Linguistics

It's almost autumn and she (or not she) is walking a dog (or god) because the weather seems like it should be comfortable. She isn't comfortable, and hasn't been all day, as though whatever she is inside is wanting to claw out of her through the skin of her arms, but it has no destination in mind, so it sits restless between meat and marrow, where it sulks.

She isn't comfortable because she is wearing pajamas and this is a nice neighborhood in a nice part of town, and even if they're passable at a glance, she's worried someone will notice. This was the choice she made, because the idea of getting Properly Dressed just to follow the dog/god and pick up its shit was exhausting.

She weighs one discomfort against the other; the neighbors will talk, or her skin on the outside will be as uncomfortable as her skin on the inside.

She imagines the neighbors already talk. She thinks she could talk. She wonders if this makes her an unkind person, because she shrinks herself from the imagined unkindness of neighbors talking. Does she have the ability to make others shrink with words they'll never hear?

Shrinkage: loss due to theft.

She says nothing about others that she wouldn't say to others. She doesn't say unkindnesses to others. She rarely speaks to others anymore.

She has begun to consider larceny.

This could be symptomatic of exhaustion. It could be cyclical. It could be something in the water.

It could be that she is running out of words to appropriately name the things around her, or within her, or expressed by her.

Dog. God. Woman. She. Honesty. Larceny.


IV. Appropriation

The weather seems like it should be comfortable, but she isn't comfortable, and in spite of this she walks the dog because this is a necessary function of pet ownership. (She does not believe she owns the dog/god. It shares her home. If 'family' were not profanity, she would say it is part of hers. This seems like it might be insulting to the dog. If the dog were god, or rather if God were present on the walk, she would have a few profane larcenies for Him regarding 'family'.)

She and the dog stop at the halfway-home portion of the sidewalk where she often stops, though never in the afternoon, though always well past midnight to watch the animals creeping from the shadows of the woods. A solitary doe has been roaming the treeline, limping hump-backed as though hit in its hindquarters by a car or a bullet or an unkindness. She has been watching it survive and heal. It has been watching her, though she doubts it cares about her own perpetuation or healing, what with it being a deer.

The foxes come and go, sometimes plump and lushly-furred, sometimes lean, sometimes existing as screams from the brush. She reads the seasons through foxes. She takes sightings as omens.

There was a raccoon once, staring from a sewer. She stared back, and then took off her shoes and walked on tiptoe through black, damp grass, crouched in moonlight, wondered out loud to the dog if being a raccoon is better than being a woman.

It's only a word.

Dog. God. Woman. She. Honesty. Larceny. Raccoon.

She has researched performing raccoon more than she has researched performing woman. She doesn't feel capable of giving a believable performance of raccoon-ness. Just because society clamors for the role to be filled doesn't mean it's the most well-considered idea to accept. (This is why white actors, able-bodied actors, neurotypical actors, straight or cis or male actors, should not perform roles which were not written for them.) (There are women who are more appropriate to perform the role of 'woman' than she is.)

(She is also not a raccoon.) (Probably.)

Unsurprisingly, the dog had no opinion on the subject.

The raccoon was gone when she looked again, as though she had absorbed its existence into her own.

She knows this is not the truth of the situation, but it was uncomfortable to think there was something in the sewer more interesting for the raccoon than the barefoot entity at the end of her leash, appropriating its existence. (This is appropriation: she could stop being a raccoon when raccoon-related problems became too onerous. The raccoon, when faced with everyday microaggressions, can't become an apex predator, instead.) (This is not a mockery of cultural appropriation. This is a teachable moment, oversimplified to elementary explanations for those who reject critical race theory.)



V. Appreciation

There are no deer or foxes today. There is no raccoon.

There is a 'woman' and a dog/god.

There is a tree, and through its branches are shards of reddening afternoon almost-autumn light, this particular sun shattered into Tiffany glass by leaves and reflecting off a cloud of diurnal insects. A bird flutters in the tree and light ricochets from its wings. The grass is impossibly green, having survived the blistering summer. The sky is impossibly blue, having survived humanity (to date.)

She thinks, I'd like to look at that for a moment. I'd like to appreciate that. It's very pretty.

Maybe I can finally be the kind of person who stops and enjoys a view for the sake of its beauty.

Maybe I can appreciate a moment.

The bird shits through the stained-glass sunlight, through the cloud of insects, onto the late-summer grass. (The sky remains unassaulted by humanity or bird shit.) (Maybe she should try being sky next. The bird shit alone, she could deal with.)

Irony isn't lost on her, even when moments of stillness are just beyond her grasp.

She appreciates the moment. She comprehends that she is aberrant. Her noncompliance is becoming a problem.

Discomfort is not universal, but it should be.

She walks home with the dog, where she misidentifies it as god.

She commits larceny.