Free Dog Eat Dog by Chris Lynch

was her smell. As I walked along behind her, she left me in a wake, a vapor trail of unwashed human smell. A person’s got to bathe regularly in steamy heat like this, and she clearly had not. To make it worse, every door and window in the place had been sealed shut and there wasn’t a fan or an air conditioner in sight.
    The house was a wreck. Dirty clothes lined the floors and I stepped on a loaf of bread on the way to the kitchen. There I stood in the doorway as Felina approached the stove and stared at it as if she were looking under the hood of a hopelessly broken-down car. She picked up the tea kettle, shook it to feel its contents, smiled, and lit the burner.
    “Ah, I’m sorry I haven’t called,” I said as I looked around the kitchen, at the sink mounded with dirty dishes, at the table mounded with possibly clean laundry.
    She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. “That’s all right,” she said, and patted my cheek as she passed on her way to the living room. “You’re sweet.”
    The living room was no better. She plopped herself down on the couch after sweeping a white takeout carton and an empty wine bottle onto the floor. The TV was already on. She waved me over, and I sat reluctantly next to her.
    Barney the dinosaur was on the TV. She stared at it, but I could tell she wasn’t really looking.
    “You want me to change that?” I asked.
    “If you want to,” she said, shrugging. “It doesn’t much matter. I just keep it on for, you know, the sound of it. And the moving. It’s always on.”
    The kettle screamed in the kitchen. I watched Felina some more, but there was no reaction to this either. I pointed toward the kitchen with my thumb.
    “You want me to get that?” I asked.
    She stood without answering, went out, and turned it off. She returned with no tea and sank back into the couch. Barney sang a song, his gang of kids sang the song. Felina sang the song too.
“If all the raindrops
    were lemondrops and gumdrops
    oh what a rain that would be
    standing outside with my mouth open wide.”
    She opened her mouth and let her tongue hang out like the rest of the kids, still singing,
“Ah, ah-ah-ah
    ah-ah-ah
    ah-ah-ah...”
    When the song was over, Felina clapped for herself and started laughing. “Where did I learn that ?”
    Then she went blank again.
    “Hey, I know,” I said after waiting in vain for her to say anything that made sense to me. “Why don’t we go out to breakfast? Ya, how ’bout to the diner? They have a corned beef hash over there, with an egg on top, and hash browns with crunchy onions, and a really thick chocolate milk...Pat’s Diner, that’s it. On me, okay, you could hop in the shower. ...” I hopped up and gestured toward the door, as if it had already been decided. I was anxious to get out.
    She looked up and smiled at me sadly. “I don’t go out. You know that. Didn’t I tell you that? I don’t go out.”
    “Ever?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “It’s not... okay. It’s not okay, that I go out.”
    It made me angry, both the situation and the fact that she was so calm about it. My hands balled into nervous fists, until I thought about Carlo and all his bulk and darkness. My fists uncurled.
    “Well, what would happen if you just went out? Just for a little while?”
    Felina shook her head no. She turned back to the TV, turned off the subject.
    “Do you miss him?” she asked quietly.
    I paused, as if I had to think about who she meant, even though I didn’t.
    “You do miss him,” she said. “I’ll bet you do. I miss him too. Do you miss him the way I miss him?” There was so much sticky hot suggestion in the way she drawled out that I , that it made me squirm. “I bet you do. I bet you do miss him that way. It certainly is sad,” she whispered, her voice getting lower and lower so that I had to strain harder and closer to hear her.
    I wanted to change the subject—not change it so much maybe as slant it differently. “You know where he is?”