A dog barked. The sound of pure threat.
Alexander’s heart raced. He turned his head. A white sedan idled at the curb, waiting for the same light to change. The woman behind the wheel had straight-cut hair and makeup that was starting to wear thin. In the back seat, the dog stood, teeth bared at the window. Its gaze was on Alexander, and with every bark, every snap of its jaw, it lunged toward the thin sheet of glass a little. Flecks of saliva dripped from its raw, wet lips, and its tail wagged with pleasure at the threat and anticipation of violence. There was an empty child’s car seat behind it, a clawed hind paw digging into the cloth upholstery. Alexander glanced away. The others were ignoring the dog; the older man looking out at the traffic light, the young one at his phone. The woman noticed Alexander looking at her and pointedly didn’t look back. They were in some other world. Some different reality where a predator wasn’t an arm’s length from them. Alexander looked away, kept his head down. Dogs didn’t jump through car windows. They didn’t attack people on the street. They waited until you were alone.
The red didn’t turn. And it didn’t turn. And it didn’t turn. The dog shouted at him, wordless and unmistakable. It wasn’t just barking. It was barking at him. It knew him, knew his scent. It wanted him. The motion at the corner of Alexander’s vision drew him back. The car’s back window was smeared with something clear and viscous. The teeth snapped white, tearing at the air. Ripping it.
The light changed. The red palm became a pale walking figure, the light went green, and the sedan pulled away, dog still barking as it went. Alexander walked into the street, carried by the flow of bodies more than any impulse of his own. By the time he reached the far corner, the sedan had vanished, woman and dog and booster seat. The thought came with a strange detachment: A child probably rode in that seat every day, to school and back from it, with that dog sitting at the far window. He wondered what the woman at the wheel would do if the kid ever started screaming.
In the office, Alexander sat at his desk, his glazed eyes on the monitor. There were words, projects, windows open that held all the information that was supposed to be his life. All he could see were teeth. After an hour, he got up and went to the back storage room where he could sit on a box of printer paper and wait for the dread to pass.
He didn’t hear Erin’s footsteps, only her sigh. Alexander looked up. She was in the doorway, a handful of pale green printer paper in her hand, a grim expression on her face. Alexander tried to smile. Tried to wave hello. His body wouldn’t comply.
“Rough day,” Erin said. It wasn’t a question.
Alexander felt a tear on his cheek. He hadn’t realized he was weeping.
“I can’t do this,” he said. His voice was weak. Erin squatted down next to him, carefully not touching.
“Do what?”
“Any of it.”
Erin nodded.
“Feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“How am, how am, how am I supposed to ignore it? How am I supposed to pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Or that it won’t happen again,” Erin agreed. “That was the worst part for me.”
Alexander looked into Erin’s waiting eyes. Her smile was sorrowful. She put down the handful of paper, pale green spreading on the floor, leaned forward, and took the bottom of her shirt in her hands, pulling the cloth up until the bare skin of her belly and side were exposed. The scars were white and ropey, and they pulled at the healthy skin around them, puckering it. Alexander couldn’t imagine the wounds that had created them, and then, for a second, he could.
She let the hem of her shirt fall. In the silence, the distant sounds of the office—voices, the hum of the air conditioner, the groan of a printer—could have come from a different world. She shifted the fallen pages with her toe, the paper scraping against the floor with a sound like dry leaves rattling down a gutter. The smell of overbrewed coffee slipped in from the breakroom, familiar and foreign at the same time.
“So how’d you do it? How did you get to where you aren’t scared all the freaking time?”
Erin’s smile drooped a little, tired with the effort.
“You’re making an assumption,” she said. “Just hang in there. It’ll get easier.”
“But not better,” Alexander said.
“But not better.”
Living without a dog felt strange. It felt wrong. It felt better than living with one. Maybe later, Alexander told himself, it would get easier.