Free White Dog Fell From the Sky by Eleanor Morse

bearded, low-slung dog was standing on a stone making
humping motions. In a fury, Lawrence picked up the bearded dog and heaved him, hard,
toward the street. The dog yelped through the air and landed.
    “What are you doing?” she
yelled.
    “He’s on our
property.”
    “So why not get a gun and shoot the
whole lot then?” She turned and walked back to the house. Minutes later, the gang
was back, Daphne sobbing, her nose pressed hard against the screen of the kitchen
window. Alice slammed the window shut.

9
    Some days, Alice talked to the emptiness in
her womb as though it were an unfurnished room. Talking had never come easily with
Lawrence. What formed in her mouth were the words,
Which of us is flawed?
Their
eyes no longer met. Sex was sweaty and unappealing. Unlike some people who love to bury
their heads in damp armpits, the thought of sticking to Lawrence in this heat was
revolting.
    It was Saturday afternoon, and Alice found
herself talking to Lillian Gordon over the side fence. Lillian was wearing a turquoise
two-piece lounge suit, her ears overstretched by a pair of heavy gold earrings. The two
women stood in the wispy shade of a wild thorn that grew on Alice’s side of the
fence. “When’s the baby coming?” Lillian asked.
    “Never,” said Alice. “I
can’t get pregnant.”
    “My first miscarriage was in Kampala,
Uganda,” Lillian said. She’d been five months along, she said, twenty-three
years old. Her husband was out of town, and she began to bleed. She was afraid to go to
the hospital, afraid to drive through the streets of a strange, volatile city.
She’d nearly died. The next miscarriage was in Namibia. After that, she’d
had at least one miscarriage a year, fourteen in all, until she was all used up. The
babies grew to about four months, and then her uterus tipped them out. Her babies were
buried all over the continent of Africa. Her voice was matter of fact. It didn’t
change even when she said they would have survived if she’d been near a major
hospital in London. Lillian Gordon was not the sort of woman who dispensed or received
hugs, but Alice reached through the fence and touched her hand. She told her that she
and Lawrence had decided that they didn’treally want children.
It wasn’t true, but it was what she’d begun to say to herself, and it was
better than crying all over the place.
    “We’ve been asked to a dinner
party at the Lunquists’,” she told Lillian.
    “Tonight?”
    “In an hour.”
    She didn’t want to go. The only reason
to say yes was knowing that she’d hear Hasse Lunquist play the piano. He was a
sweet-tempered man who’d had his piano shipped out, courtesy of the Swedish
government. He worked for Radio Botswana. His wife, Erika, worked in Lawrence’s
section at the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning.
    Alice went inside to get ready. Lawrence was
just stepping out of the shower looking happy and rosy. “Your turn,” he
said. Daphne was asleep on the floor, gathering energy for the night.
    “How long do dogs stay in heat?”
Alice asked.
    “Three weeks,” he said, but she
could tell from the way he hesitated that he’d just made this up. She didn’t
remember Lawrence ever saying, “I don’t know.”
    “Why don’t you just say you
don’t know when you don’t? It’s okay not to know.”
    “I told you the answer. I don’t
know why that doesn’t satisfy you.”
    She walked into the bathroom and stepped out
of her clothes. The water trickled over her body. She imagined it sizzling with the heat
in her. And then she thought of Lillian’s uterus. Fourteen times it had turned and
poured her babies out, small worlds disappearing.
    Once upon a time, Lawrence had told her that
she had a beautiful body. Well proportioned, he called it, as though she were a horse.
At thirty-one, her body was still young, but next year it would be less young. By then,
all the auburn would be gone from her hair, replaced by gray. I’m young, she
thought.