Same Shit

Fiction...finally.

My bare foot lands in dog shit.

Lilly. Guilty. Wagging.

Both at once.

03:11:04. The phone knows. The phone always knows.

I didn’t set it to military time but someone did.

Her name is Lilly. In my head sometimes Jack.

---

Jack. Blue-nose pit. Eighty-two pounds. Faster than any of the othrt neighborhood dogs. Wet grass in summer, cold dirt, bare feet, the dog running circles like the only law that mattered was keep moving keep moving don’t stop.

My father. Kitchen. Coffee. The sound. Soft. Shoe dragging across tile.

God damn it.

First time I heard it. Same shit, different day.

Later I would understand what it meant.
Later came faster than I wanted.

---

Sleep is not sleep. Sleep is inventory. Doorframe. Exit. The weight of the dark sorted and catalogued while the eyes are closed. The military builds this in and doesn’t offer a warranty.

Third endoscopy this year. Flexible gastroscope, 9.9mm insertion tube diameter, images transmitted to a display while I got the good drugs. The nurse says it was Michael Jackson’s drug of choice. Where the fuck can I get some of that?

The doctor asks me my name one last time. Condition documented. Claim pending.

Pending.

Eighteen months of pending.

---

The phone: Your DoorDash acceptance rate has dropped below 70%. This may affect your eligibility for premium orders. The bank app behind it, the number I already know, lower than yesterday, rent on the first, bills from ex wife about kid shit — on time, always on time, private school she selected, $12K annually, dance classes Tuesdays and Thursdays, insurance through her plan, the one good thing about the arrangement except I pay into a life. The life belongs to someone else now. The one who fucked in my bed.

I’ve made a point of writing this 10, 347 ways. It never gets easier.

Elizabeth is in the backseat, voice careful the way ten-year-olds get when they already know the answer: Mom cheated on you didn’t she Dad.

The rearview mirror. Her eyes. No. Where’d you get that.

She looked out the window.

I should have told her. The truth has a half-life. Eventually it decays into something worse.

Same shit. Different day.

---

gun in my hand don’t remember the closet and the metal is heavier than

00:12:14

00:12:13

Beretta M9. Standard issue. Came home with me after Afghanistan. 33.5 ounces not loaded. Fifteen round magazine, one in the chamber, the familiar weight of forty ounces that means something specific in the hands of someone who was trained to get three shots in two seconds, one head, two chest

00:11:58

Lilly at the door. I don’t move.

Headlights cross the wall. Wrong house.

The front door opens.

Dad?

Backpack. Wall. The specific sound of her sneakers which are Nike, all the kids wear them now, size 4.5 youth, purchased six weeks ago at mall, she wanted the ones with the butterflies on the heel but they didn’t have her size, she settled, she didn’t complain, she never complains about the things that actually

Eww.

I know that sound.

Dad Lilly pooped inside again.

The squish. One foot. Hopping. The door opens and she’s holding the shoe up and Lilly is behind her, wagging, and Emma’s face is doing the thing where she looks exactly like her mother used to look before everything became a transaction

stop

Come here.

She hops over. Drops onto the bed. I take the shoe. Put it on the floor. Put the gun on the nightstand.

She doesn’t say anything about the gun.

She needs to go out before bed that’s why she does it.

I know.

So why didn’t you.

I don’t answer. She leans into my shoulder. Lilly takes the gap between us like it was always hers.

Three of us in the dark. The man the military made. The kid I made. The dog who has no record of any of it and loves us anyway, tail still going, no concept of what she keeps walking into, no concept of anything except

right now

which is this

which is enough

Same shit.

Still a day.