Dog Love by Joseph Young

    First time I ever gave love to a girl, I was 13. We were smoking twigs from a lilac bush out back of her house, and Jean asked me, what was it like having a thing? I said it was good, oh so good, on a summer night when the frogs were thick in the pines and the moon was orange in the window screen, and you had it in your hand, working it so slow. She said she wanted to watch me, and I said okay, and then she said she wanted it in her, and I said okay again. It was hot in the rafters of her garage, and her skin smelled of sweet mown grass.
    Forty years later, I'm married to her sister Sari. But where Jean had lovely handfuls up front, even at 13, Sari is just a stretch of dirt road, a pothole in the center of her belly and some clods of earth up top. And she doesn't smell of heat and grass, but of onions, paste, and bitter weed. I can't ride her without a sinking in my heart, same as the day 30 years ago when death put Jean in the ground. I took Sari to the willows that day, pleaded with her to let me in, and with a grimace she opened her legs.
    This morning we heard a whimper under the porch, and Sari got up to check on Girl. Some months back, we came home from the hardware to see Girl and the neighbor dog linked tight, the neighbor dog rocking hard into Girl's backside, Girl lifting her head at the sky and moaning like God's glory. "Pull 'em apart!" Sari had said, and when I looked at her like she was the Queen of Ice, she went in the shed and got a stick to wedge between them. All the good it did.
    So I'm sitting on the porch when Sari comes from underneath, covered in dirt, eyebrow to toe. "Have you know," she says, "We got six damn dogs to contend with now. That won't be a burden. No sir." She slams through the door, and in a minute I hear the shower run.
    After crawling under the porch and taking a look at them blind-eyed pups suckling their mother's teats, wiggling with the life in them, I go through the screen door, too. I press up the stairs and down the hall to the bathroom door. Inside, I hear Sari moving around, brush ripping through her wet hair, swish of water as she scrubs out the tub.
    "Sari," I say, and push in. She's on the toilet, naked and pink, sucking her cigarette. "Sari, you and I are different as black and white, up and down, morning and eve. Sari," I say, "I don't know why I married you."
    She looks up through her smoke, tiny, wrinkly breasts poking the air, brows pinching tight. She shrugs. "Wasn't no one with the sense to pull us apart," she says.

About the author:
Joseph's work has appeared or is forthcoming in storySouth, Hobart, Blue Moon Review, The God Particle, Mississippi Review, Literary Potpourri, Opium, Pindeldyboz, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere.