The Shard

My doggo Duchess just fish-butted into our couch cushion, a smear of viscous black low-tide stench that the Vet told me can happen time to foul time, anal gland secretion, a natural process, but naturally my girlfriend is annoyed because the couch is new to us, a used gift from her upper middle class parents to her daughter and her working class beau, and our us-ness is newish too, and she never wanted a dog, not really, only agreed because she thought it could absorb some of the weight of my affections—I’m a big man with big feelings and big needs and I’m big enough to admit it—so she orders me to take Duchess out, “get her out of here, will ya?” and I understand her anger but also love her cute little East Coast “will ya” which for some reason reminds me of old Hollywood, the incongruous faces of the fifties and sixties, character actors, my favorite Walters Brennan and Matthau, and I say to her “don’t body shame, it’s a natural occurrence, she can’t help it” which I think is very forward-thinking of me, very woke, though I actually believe in shame and shaming as a tool or tactic and also the power of shamelessness but ultimately that we all should feel some shame for being human, flawed, for the way each of us necessarily, as a fact of our humanness, shits up the world a bit by being here, kicks up some suffering, and that that’s ok too, just something to be aware of as we live out our lives, a tiny shard of awareness to puncture our pride and arrogance and narcissism and certitude, then she says “help me by getting the fuck out of here for half an hour, will ya?” and hoping she’s not ashamed of me, I pass her the spray bottle of Nature’s Miracle I picked up with all the other accoutrements I bought in bulk when we adopted Duchess and our fingers touch in the exchange and there’s that charge I always get when she’s near but I’m never sure if it’s entirely mutual, a new circuit being made, or if it’s just a reflection of the high-voltage need always crackling within me, and I say “come Duchess, you royal beauty you,” and I wrangle her into her new hot pink harness and our usual morning routine of parading up and down the block commences and, like the good girl she is, she poops not on Tim’s yard but on the hellstrip and pees twice just to let the other neighborhood dogs know that she’s still around and after about twenty minutes of this morning loveliness we return and I pause at the front door to scrape my shoes on the welcome mat like a well-raised gentleman and through the little circular window I see that the cushion is still smeared and that my girlfriend is sitting beside it, staring at the spot, the stinky stain, and quietly—quiet to me, anyway, on the other side of a closed door, the door of our place and maybe her heart—crying and looking very small on that newish couch and I feel that shard in me now and it’s so, so sharp.