DOG

Dusk in a city street. Down the belly of the hot dog, the zigzag of mustard was a yellow scar, a zipper, a blueprint for a vagina. I was imagining the delicate lifting of sand as the wind caressed the desert floor. I remembered a new word that I’d read. ‘Benthic’: the lowest level of a body of water. Are there names for the layers of sand?

I had a newspaper under my arm. I carried a plastic bag filled with convenience store groceries and a lottery ticket. The hot dog was seven feet tall and held a gun to my face. Its eyes were innocent, googly like those little eyes you can buy to stick on things. “Help me,’ it said. “—by dying. I want to know what it is like. We hotdogs are not mortal but yet we also do not live forever. We do not really ever live. This gun, it is a hot bird, a quick breath, a jump across a river, a flash of love. I have never felt so much like I have a heart. I remember the pig, or the cow that was my early years. I give you your death so that you can give it to me. One part of the life – the end – that I can never live.”

From down the grey throat of the sidewalk, the wind scuffling garbage. Dust from the gutters. Flocks of birds over the flat tar roofs. A star, a bright bullet hole, visible in the terry cloth of the approaching night.

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Image by Will Sweeney