The house had been yellow once. Óscar could see the places where the paint had peeled back entirely from the wooden siding, leaving splintered patches of grey in its wake. Its scabby state was of a piece with its other features: the missing shingles, the lawn blistered with weeds, the black door haunted by the rusted ghost of a street number.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Caleb. His spindly hands held fast at two and ten on the steering wheel.
“I’m not thinking anything,” Óscar replied.
“Yes, you are.” Caleb’s voice was calm. “You’re thinking this looks like the kind of house where people die in movies.”
Óscar said nothing, because he had been thinking that, or something like it, and he did not want Caleb to know. He reached over to peel one of the hands off the steering wheel. The skin was cool, a little clammy.
Curtains fluttered in a black-bordered window above the porch. Óscar thought for a moment that he could see a face there, obscured by white cotton. A flash, then it was gone, the curtains settling back into place.
“That’s probably Mom,” Caleb said, following his gaze. “Or Uncle Howie, maybe. Not Silly, she’ll be out somewhere.” He turned to look at Óscar. His was a strange face, striking rather than handsome, dominated by a large nose and eyes with heavy, tired lids. “We can go if you want. You don’t need to meet them today.”
Somewhere beyond the house, a dog barked. Then another.
Óscar ran his thumb down the back of Caleb’s hand, over raised bluish veins and protruding tendons. The fingers were long and delicate, a marked contrast to Óscar’s own. He raised the hand to his mouth and kissed it, marveling as he did so that this was something he could do. A year into their relationship, he still could not think of kissing Caleb as an everyday occurrence. Each time, it felt like a gift, something extraordinary that had come to him by accident, not design.
“I want to meet them,” he said. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
It was not a good joke, but Caleb smiled anyway. It was his smile that had first attracted Óscar, that startling blast of white that came and went like the wink of a coin tossed in the sun. His hand, which had been limp, came to life and squeezed.
The sky overhead was pearl-grey, thick with cloud. It looked like rain.
◊ ◊ ◊
Caleb’s mother was waiting for them inside, beaming as they took off their shoes. She was small, androgynously plump in the way of post-menopausal women, with thick glasses and hair that had lost much of its colour. Behind her, a staircase disappeared into shadow.
“I was so worried!” she cried, standing on the tips of her toes to throw her arms around her son’s neck. Her feet were sheathed in battered blue slippers, the bows on the front grey with age. Her forearms looked battered as well, the skin covered in angry blisters of red and white. Psoriasis, Óscar thought. “It said on the radio that there’s a storm coming. I didn’t hear the whole story, something about the tail end of a hurricane, but they said the winds would be terrible, just terrible. Don’t that just figure, I said, the first time my baby comes to see me in almost a year and he gets blown off the road and into the ocean. It would happen, wouldn’t it, with our luck?”
She said all this while holding tight to Caleb, her voice muffled as she pushed his face into the soft plaid of his shirt. Caleb finally held her back, disentangling himself from her embrace.
“Óscar, this is my mother, Margie,” he said, patting her gentle on the shoulder. Her arms remained outstretched, clutching at the dangling ends of his shirt, and he turned her gently towards Óscar. “Mom, this is Óscar, my boyfriend.”
Despite his nerves, Óscar couldn’t help the warm glow that suffused him at the word boyfriend. He had never been introduced as anyone’s boyfriend before. Had never been anyone’s boyfriend before.
Caleb’s mother looked Óscar up and down, her brow furrowing. Óscar wondered if she had forgotten that he was coming. Or was she comparing the spread of his belly and the softness of his face to her son’s neat, spare limbs, his unruly black curls to Caleb’s carefully parted hair? Was she wondering, as Óscar himself occasionally did, what Caleb saw in him?
“Oscar,” she said, her unmusical tongue knocking the accent off his name. “Well, hello there, honey. I’m so glad you’re here. Caleb’s told me a million things about you. I said to him, you’ve just got to bring this boy home, Caleb, otherwise we’re going to think you’re ashamed of us!” Her laughter was loud, apparently sincere. “And now he has! It’s wonderful, just wonderful. Howie!”—this shouted over her shoulder, up the stairs. “Howie, the boys are here!”
No answer came. Margie looked back over her shoulder for a long moment, her body utterly still, as though frozen. After a few seconds, Caleb reached out to tap her gently on the shoulder. A little twitch ran through her as her head snapped back around.
Oscar looked again at her arms and realized that those spots of red and white skin were not psoriasis at all. Scars, clusters of tiny round scars. As though she’d been burned, many years ago, with cigarettes.
“Well, Howie won’t be down until dinner, I bet,” she said, “and it’s almost ready now. About time for Silly to come in. She’s out in the woods now, chasing dogs. Why don’t you boys go upstairs, freshen up a bit. I’ll call when it’s time to eat.”
She turned for another moment to gaze up the staircase, as though she could see something in the dark.
The carpet on the stairs was dirty, its pile long gone. There were pictures on the wall that Óscar could not see in the greyish light filtering in from outside. He followed his boyfriend down the upstairs hall to a door with an acrylic red C on the wood, little cracks disturbing the surface of the paint. Caleb opened it, looking suddenly very young and very shy.
“My room,” he said, and ushered Óscar in.
The room was unremarkable. Small, cheap pine furniture, a narrow twin bed with a striped comforter. Walls that uncomfortable shade of blue that was one of very few boy-approved bedroom colours. A desk cluttered with dusty stacks of notebooks, cups of pens, loose sheets of paper. Pinned to the wall above was a poster from a raunchy comedy that had been popular when they were both in high school. If Óscar had been told to close his eyes and imagine a teenage boy’s bedroom, he would have pictured this.
Only one item in the room surprised him: a stuffed bear, slumped on top of the dresser. Like the bows on Margie’s slippers, it had aged to grey, and it drooped limply in a way that implied exhaustion or drunkenness. The fur on its paws and muzzle looked like it had once been a peachy colour, the one that Óscar’s childhood crayon box had called “flesh,” though it had not matched the colour of his own. There was a hole in the muzzle where a nose had once been, exposing yellowed stuffing. The hole unnerved Óscar. There was something indecent, almost pornographic, about that glimpse of the animal’s insides.
Caleb, following his eyes, walked across the room to pick up the bear. He cradled the floppy, greying creature with surprising tenderness.
“Dad gave him to me,” he said.
Caleb did not often speak about his father. The man had died, he had once told Óscar, when he was only a baby. He did not remember him. He had said it matter-of-factly, as though this loss was a source neither of angst nor regret.
“Cute,” Óscar said, although the bear was not cute. “What’s his name?”
“Boris.” A faint pink blush appeared on the skin stretched over his cheekbones. “After Boris Yeltsin.”
“Boris Yeltsin?”
Caleb put the bear down and turned to his desk. “He was on TV a lot when I was a kid,” he said, his slender hands rearranging a stick of deodorant, a dull brass trophy, an action figure. “I thought his name sounded cool. Mine is so bland, you know? Caleb Whyte. Like a nineteenth-century farmhand.”
Óscar pictured Caleb as a farmhand, a barefoot yokel with a blistering sunburn, in dirty overalls and a battered straw hat. To his surprise and embarrassment, he found it tremendously attractive, even erotic.
Time for a change of subject. Sitting on the edge of the twin bed, he asked, “What did your mom mean earlier?”
“About what?” Caleb didn’t turn around to look at him when he said it. This was not unusual. Sometimes he would hold whole conversations without meeting Óscar’s eyes, his back turned, his attention half-fixed on something else. “What did she say?”
“That your sister was out chasing dogs.”
“Oh, that.” Caleb did turn around then, still holding an object from his dresser. An old mint tin, some adolescent miscellanea rattling merrily inside of it. “Well—”
And, on cue, Margie’s voice drifted up the stairs, telling them that dinner was ready.
◊ ◊ ◊
The dining room was as dark as the rest of the house, the long oak table steeped in shadow. A plate steamed at each place, emitting strange, chemical smells. At the head of the table sat Margie, beaming up at Óscar and Caleb as they came through the door. On the far side of the table was a woman who was no longer young, dressed almost as Caleb had been in Óscar’s mind moments before: overalls, dirt. At the foot of the table sat an old man, his thinning grey hair gathered into a half-hearted ponytail.
“Óscar,” Caleb said, gesturing Óscar to a seat across from the woman, “this is my uncle Howie, and my sister Silly.”
“Sylvia,” the woman said. She looked, Óscar thought, as though she’d been created specifically in opposition to her brother: her hair fair where his was dark, her skin drab to his warm olive. Her face had none of the interesting proportions that were so alluring on Caleb; it was broad, flattish, with eyes that bulged. Her mouth was almost lipless. “It’s Sylvia, Caleb.”
“Sylvia,” Óscar repeated, and reached across the table to offer the woman his hand to shake. She looked at it, then him. He pulled his hand back untouched.
The old man at the end of the table giggled. His eyes were wide and wet, with pink threads visible in the whites. The loose flesh beneath his chin hung in intricate yonic folds. Óscar smiled at him, hoping to drain some of the tension from the air, but when he did Howie flinched. The wet in his eyes spilled and trickled down his soft grey cheeks. Óscar looked to Caleb for guidance, unsure what he had done to provoke tears.
“It’s okay,” Caleb murmured. His hand found Óscar’s beneath the table, the cold tips of his fingers tickling the skin. “Uncle Howie’s just like that. He cries. It’s fine.”
“No whispering, boys!” Margie chided, shaking a finger at her son. “Rude to whisper at the table. Makes me think you’re keeping secrets!”
She laughed. Howie joined her, even as his eyes continued to spill. Sylvia shook her head and muttered under her breath, turning her attention to her food.
For it was food on the plates, although at first glance it looked like a colourless pile. There was a chicken breast, suffocating in a thick beige sauce spotted with shriveled mushrooms; a stack of limp, grey things that might have once been green beans; a daunting mountain of mashed potatoes, lumps erupting through the white surface like ripe boils. When he put a forkful of chicken in his mouth, Óscar had to pause for a moment. Salty, earthy, strangely concentrated. It was a familiar taste, one that spoke to him of his undergraduate days.
“Is this canned soup?” he asked after managing, with some difficulty, to swallow. “Cream of mushroom soup?”
Margie beamed. “That’s a good palate you have there, Oscar,” she said. “Easiest thing in the world to make, you know. Just boil up the breasts, then heat the soup in the microwave and pour it on top. You don’t even have to add water.”
“It was our favourite when we were kids,” Caleb said. He was eating the chicken without a flicker of distaste. “Maybe I’ll make it for you sometime.”
Please don’t, Oscar thought, and shoved a forkful of potato in his mouth to make sure he didn’t say it out loud. The texture was coarse and mealy, sodden with greasy margarine. Margie watched him with evident satisfaction, still beaming.
“I love having dinner as a family,” she said, looking from one face to the next. Howie met her eyes and giggled again, grey-white sauce frosting his lips. “Isn’t it nice, Silly? Feels just like a holiday, doesn’t it?”
“Sure,” said Sylvia. Her mouth was full. Óscar could see past the white slabs of her teeth to the mush coating her tongue, bits of chicken and lumps of potato and clinging shreds of mushrooms. “Like fucking Christmas, Mom.”
Her mother let loose an avian titter. “Don’t swear, honey. What on earth will poor Oscar think of us?”
Sylvia looked his way, as though expecting an answer. Under the weight of her eyes, Óscar felt himself begin to perspire. He reached for his water glass, but the sides were clouded with fingerprints, smudges of grease, bits of clinging black grit. He pulled his hand away.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Cursing doesn’t bother me.”
Margie beamed again. Leaning forward, she reached over across the table and strained until she touched his hand.
“You’re a good boy,” she said, “a real good boy. But, of course, I knew you would be. My Caleb’s a good boy, too. You see that bear in his bedroom? He’s had that since he was a baby. Didn’t even care about the other boys making fun of him, calling him sissy. Even after his friends snipped its nose off, he wouldn’t get rid of it. Not the bear his daddy gave him.”
Her voice faltered a little bit on the word ‘daddy.’ Óscar snuck a look at Caleb from the corner of his eye, but his boyfriend’s expression was placid as a cow’s.
“When you love something,” he said, “you don’t get rid of it.”
Óscar remembered the gaping hole in the bear’s face, that indecent exposure of stuffing. From the end of the table, Howie looked at him and giggled, flattening his lumpy mashed potatoes with a fork.
Margie patted Óscar’s hand again. Under the dim light of the dining room lamp, her scars glistened.
“Caleb used to scream for hours when he was little, you know,” she said. “And bite, and kick. When I put him down in his crib for a nap, he would bang his little head against the bars until it started to swell. Like he’d been beaten. I worried that he took after…”
Margie’s eyes went away for a moment, staring at something that none of them could see. She seemed, for a moment, locked in a kind of rigor mortis, her only movement a muscle twitching in her jaw.
It was Sylvia who broke the spell, reaching out to give her mother a none-too-gentle smack on the shoulder. Margie’s eyes snapped back to the room, the table, the assembled diners.
“But look at him now!” she concluded. Her smile stretched across her soft and fallen face. “Handsome, smart, sweet as pie. A good, good boy.”
From outside came the sound of rain, the beginning of a steady pat-pat-pat against the windowpanes.
◊ ◊ ◊
After dessert, a rice pudding with undercooked grains that crunched between the teeth, Margie insisted that they go to the living room for what she called “a nice little sit.”
“You can’t go right back on the road, boys,” she said, lowering herself into an easy chair. It was yellow, the fabric worn thready-white on the arms. “You’ve got to have a little sit. Helps the digestion.”
The living room was made small by the abundance of furniture crammed into it, the easy chair kitty-corner to the battered loveseat that Caleb and Óscar shared, two rocking chairs occupied by Howie and Sylvia crowding the corners. The rest of the space was taken up by nesting tables, floor lamps, a rose-patterned rug, a chipped credenza crowned with layers of yellowing doilies. On the table next to Margie’s chair was a radio, a relic from the seventies at least, blaring out a song that Óscar knew but could not name.
They sat, all of them, and listened to it. Margie’s head nodded along to the music, her expression almost painfully content. Sylvia glared at the radio as though it had done her wrong. Howie slumped limply in his rocker, barely moving. His eyes still trickled gently.
The song ended. Another began. Without turning his head, Óscar looked at Caleb from the corner of his eye. His boyfriend’s expression was a mirror of his mother’s, his eyes sleepy and untroubled. They looked, Óscar thought, unnervingly similar.
The rain was falling harder now, more pound than patter.
“Babe,” Óscar said, hoping his voice was quiet enough to avoid detection, but it was no use. As Caleb turned to look at him, three other pairs of eyes followed. “It sounds like it’s getting nasty out there. Don’t you think we should head out?”
Margie straightened in her chair, her eyes flying wide. “Oh, but you can’t go yet!” she cried. “You haven’t even stayed two hours.”
“Shouldn’t go out at all, tonight,” said Sylvia, rocking like she had a vendetta against the floorboards under her chair. “Too many dogs out there. I got one this afternoon, though. Hung it up outside the shed.”
Óscar frowned, wondering if he’d misheard. “Hung it up?” he said, and Sylvia’s bulging eyes fixed on him, gleaming in the lamplight.
“Hung,” she said. “What you got to do, see, is snare them, so they’re still alive. Then you slip the rope around their necks, string ’em up from a tree. Not enough to choke ’em right away. It’s got to take time, it’s got to hurt. You leave them there to die, let them dangle and rot. It keeps the rest of the pack away. Supposed to, anyway.”
Óscar swallowed. He felt suddenly conscious of his own neck, had to fold his hands on top of each other to keep from touching it.
“So… dogs are a problem around here?” he said. He directed the question to Caleb, but it was Margie who replied.
“Oh, honey, you wouldn’t believe it! Why, you can’t even step onto the back porch without getting swarmed some days. Especially if they smell food. They live in the woods—someone dumped a litter there years ago, I suppose, and they just kept having babies with each other. Brothers and sisters together, you know. All inbred and savage. There are lots of them now, roaming wild.” She rubbed her hand along the scars on her forearm, as though trying to scrub the marks away. “That’s how Gary died. My husband.”
Óscar looked at Caleb again, hoping for some change in expression, some flicker of feeling. Caleb gazed back with fathomless eyes and smiled.
“He was out on the back porch,” he said. “Just a few days after I was born. They got him while he was having a smoke.”
“We’d just moved in,” Margie said, hands pressed against her spreading bosom. “We didn’t know, you see, about the dogs. How many there were. Silly was just a little, little girl, but she saw it from the window, poor thing. Howie, too. They watched the dogs come out of the woods, start jumping at him. One got him by the throat. Howie went to get the gun, of course, but by the time he came out…” She sighed and shook her head. “I was asleep upstairs with Caleb. I didn’t even know that anything had happened until Silly started screaming.”
Sylvia made a noise in her throat, something between a growl and a grunt. “Moral of the story,” she said, “don’t smoke.”
In his rocking chair, Howie giggled softly to himself, his mouth moving to shape a word that no one could hear.
“I’m sorry,” Óscar said eventually. He had tried and failed to think of something better to say. “That’s horrible.”
Sylvia snorted. “It’s not horrible,” she said, as though speaking to a child. “It’s dogs.”
A flash of white at the window, and then, seconds later, a crash like cracking glass in the sky. Margie jumped in place, barely stifling a shriek.
“Oh,” she said, “that thunder! You boys can’t drive back in all that. This road floods sometimes. No, you need to stay here for the night. You can bunk in Caleb’s old room. I don’t mind you sleeping in the same bed, you know. I’m no prude.”
She favoured Óscar with a roguish wink. Óscar felt the weight of the food in his belly, rice pudding mingling queasily with mushroom soup and lumpy potatoes.
“Caleb?” he said, hoping that his boyfriend would stand firm, say no, lead the charge out of the living room and into the car so they could both laugh about the evening, the terrible dinner, Sylvia’s scowl and Howie’s leaking eyes. But Caleb looked at his mother, nodded, reached out to seize Óscar’s hand.
“She’s right,” he said, his thin fingers a spindly trap. “The road does flood. We’d better stay.”
A second flash of lightning at the window turned Margie’s delighted smile into a grimace, thunder drowning out her exclamations of joy.
◊ ◊ ◊
The bed was not big enough for them both. They lay in a spooning position, both in t-shirts and underwear. Caleb’s elbows poked into Óscar’s sides. When the lightning came, he found his eyes drawn to the vague shape of the bear on top of the dresser, imagining its scratched and cloudy eyes seeking him out across the room.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your dad?” he asked, his voice not quite a whisper. Caleb shifted, sighed. His knee dug into the softness of Óscar’s back.
“It didn’t seem relevant,” was his eventual reply. “I never met him. He’s not… not real to me, you know? The way he died, all that, it’s just a story.”
“A pretty fucking important story.”
“Not to me. To Silly, maybe, and to Howie. They were there, they saw it. I didn’t.”
Óscar wiggled around until he and Caleb were face to face, wincing at the shrieking of the bedsprings. Their noses almost touched.
“And what about Sylvia?” he said. In the dark, he could make out only the rudest approximations of his boyfriend’s features. “That thing she said about hanging dogs? And Howie, with the crying? They don’t seem … they don’t seem okay.”
“Óscar.” Caleb’s voice had an edge to it now. “This is my family. I brought you here because I wanted you to meet them. I thought you’d like them. They like you. Mom had a great time, she told me so herself.”
Óscar knew that this was the moment when he was supposed to say something reassuring. He opened his mouth to do it, but the words died before they got to his tongue.
“How did she get those scars?” was what he said instead.
Caleb’s arm, which had been curved around Óscar’s waist, withdrew.
Óscar turned onto his back, crowding Caleb into the wall. The ceiling was decorated with those star stickers that glowed in the dark. The phosphorescence had dimmed over time, and their shine was faint.
“Maybe this was a mistake.”
Óscar thought they were his own words at first. Only after a few seconds of silence did he realize it was Caleb’s voice saying them.
“Coming here, you mean?” he asked, but his boyfriend did not answer. His stomach cramped sharply.
Mistake, he thought, mistake, mistake, the word chasing its tail in his head until it started to lose shape, meaning.
With a grunt, Óscar swung himself out of bed. “Bathroom,” he said, and stumbled forward into the dark, feeling his way to the bathroom at the other end of the hallway.
The bathroom was tiled in avocado green, the tub browned with dirt, the mirror crusted with flecks of toothpaste. The window above the toilet was small and bare, no blinds or curtains. The toilet itself was sheathed in crocheted doilies, yellowed with what he hoped was age. One for the top of the tank, one for the lid, one at the base. It was so well-dressed that Óscar felt distinctly strange about sitting on it, but sit he did, his head falling back until it hit the wall with a thump.
Maybe Caleb was right.
Maybe it was a mistake, the whole thing.
The sound did not register to him at first. It could have been thunder. It could have been the wind. But then it came again, and again, and Óscar listened until the sound collapsed into what it was: dogs, howling.
He had to stand on the toilet to see out the window, his feet sinking deep into the crocheted lid cover. Pressing his nose to the glass, he stared down into the backyard behind the house, nothing but bare dirt and irregular patches of grass, a black blot of shed against the treeline. It was hard to see in the dark, but if he squinted he could just make out a limp shape dangling from the branch of a tree.
“You leave them there to die,” Sylvia had said, “let them dangle and rot. It keeps the rest of the pack away.”
The shape gave a pathetic wiggle, like the last struggle of a fish gasping on a dock. From the woods there came another ululating chorus of sorrow, rising over the wind.
Óscar’s body moved on its own. Out of the bathroom, down the stairs and through the front door, into the dark, wet chaos of the night.
Rain stung his face as he made his way to the back of the house, stumbling over stray rocks and rises in the soil, falling once. He caught himself on the heels of his hands, felt the skin tear. It didn’t hurt. He got to his feet, making his fumbling way through the yard, to the shed, to the tree where the dog swung in the wind.
Lightning flickered weakly overhead, illuminating the dog’s ragged ears, its thrice-broken tail. Its hind paws were only inches from the ground. Its eyes were barely open, its muzzle damp with foam.
It looked dead already. Perhaps the movement he had seen from the bathroom window had been some kind of illusion, brought on by the storm.
Óscar tugged at the rope. A strangled whimper came from the animal’s throat as he did so, the sound of a creature so tormented that pain had become only a faint shiver in the body. It snapped desperately at the air, looking for something to bite.
The knot was strong, made stronger by the wet and the animal’s hours of thrashing, but Óscar dug between the nylon fibers with his fingernails, feeling his way through. Another howl came from the woods, closer, louder. He could see shapes moving in the trees, flashes of pale fur, the sound of creeping paws. He tore into the rope, felt his fingers slip and one of his fingernails rip.
“Come on,” he hissed, and something in the sound of his own voice, or maybe the sound of the approaching dogs, gave him the strength to wrench through the choking clasp of the rope. The knot fell apart, releasing its hostage. The dog collapsed to the ground.
It lay there for a long moment, unmoving. Óscar thought again that the animal was dead, that he had come, after all, too late. He knelt by the animal’s side, placing a trembling hand onto its fur. He could feel ribs pressed against the skin.
A twitch ran through the dog’s flank, as though in response to a bite from an insect. A growl buzzed in its throat. The eyes opened, regarding Óscar warily. Ready to accept him as a saviour, but ready, also, to perceive him as a threat.
Óscar drew his hand back, stepped away. The dog waited a few more seconds before it climbed tremblingly to its feet, almost falling.
Beyond the shed, from the shadow of the trees, four more dogs emerged. Half-starved, bedraggled, they stood silent as watchmen, their eyes fixed on Óscar as their companion made its halting way towards them. One licked its muzzle, a warning.
Óscar took a slow step back from the trio, his hands open at his sides. The rain ran down his face, into his eyes, dripped off his chin. A faint rumble of thunder sounded in the distance, so quiet he could barely hear it.
“Good boys,” he said. “Good, good boys.”
Elliott Gish is a writer and librarian from Nova Scotia. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, The Ex-Puritan, Grain Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, and many others. Her debut novel, Grey Dog (ECW Press 2024), was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction. Elliott lives in Halifax with her wife and a small black cat who may or may not be her familiar.
