Lil Fucker

We bury Lil Fucker facing north in the frozen yard, halfway between the dogwood tree and the rusted tin shed, in the spot where he liked to shit. Daddy Lin tamps the dirt with the back of the shovel and hocks a pink gob onto the snow next to Lil Fucker’s fresh grave. Were he a gambling man, Daddy Lin says, he would’ve gambled on Lil Fucker having a couple more years of bark left in him if the air hadn’t been so thick this winter.

Daddy Lin waves his hands at the polluted fog like he’s trying to move the toxic molecules out of the way and rants about Big Oil, how it’s the shit we can’t see that’ll kill us—pieces of crap thirty times smaller than a human hair—and do I reckon if my mother fucked off to Reno or is she somewhere up there with God, laughing?

I shrug, knowing Daddy Lin’s not really expecting an answer, he just needs to talk. Lil Fucker was the last link either of us had to my mother. And in those long whimpering nights after she left, the dog earned his new name clawing at the door, gouging the dark wood until it splintered.

Daddy Lin hocks and spits pink again, tinting the snow the color of old bubblegum and the setting plaster on Jordan Kowalski’s bedroom wall, the same pukey color of the poison sky that spreads over the city, from the Wasatch Front in the east to the Oquirrh Mountains in the west, cloaking even the Angel Moroni perched on the highest spire at Temple Square.

There’s no point in explaining to Daddy Lin that it’s warm weather pressing in on the cold ground that traps the bad air. That it was likely a similar pressure that caged my mother and caused her to fuck off without saying goodbye, and that if I had been the gambling sort, I would’ve put money on her leaving sooner than she did. I would have bet on her bringing me along, not abandoning me in the Great Basin, a soup bowl of emphysema and runaway third wives—a place which is only great if you’re into skiing, gambling, and God.

I breathe through my scarf so I don’t have to taste the air while Daddy Lin coughs clouds that mist between us. He gulps and wheezes, recovering enough to raise his empty fist and toast Lil Fucker for being the third-best dog we ever knew.

Afterward, he heads back inside to sink into the warm, human-sized dent in his recliner, and I head over to Jordan Kowalski’s and sink into the warm, human-sized dent in his mattress.

Jordan asks if I want to watch a movie, and I shrug because I’m trying not to think about Big Oil or Lil Fucker freezing under the ground or the pink gob freezing onto the snow. And maybe because my skin prickles like it holds the scar of every groove Lil Fucker scratched into the wooden door, or maybe because I know Jordan’s mom will be back from Temple soon and it’ll be a cold walk home, I ask Jordan if he ever had a mind to leave the church and fuck off to somewhere warmer, brighter.

We consider our options and listen to The Smiths and kiss and kiss, the pinks of our bellies grazing, until the only thing I want to feel is the warm weight of Jordan’s body pressing me down and down and down until some small part of me finally rises up.