Dog’s Rothko by Sara Grace
Sara Grace’s “Dog’s Rothko” is one of three winners for the CRAFT 2024 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Meg Pokrass.
In this intriguing and innovative story we are presented with a canine’s intimate view of the world, one in which the olfactory sense predominates in much the same way as vision does in the case of most humans. As protagonist, a detection dog leads her handler through a forest in search of a missing child guided by the intensification of scent. The author skillfully moves the narrative along through the dog’s acutely perceptive sense of smell, which is transformed at its conclusion into a Rothko-like burst of color. Hinted at, though not ever explicitly stated, is the strange parallel between a dog’s instinctual pursuit of the blood trail juxtaposed against the human sadness of violence and death. —Meg Pokrass
And the sun and the sun and the sun!
And the wet grass, wet on the nose, scent of dew and worm and no yes no yes, another!
Meat, meat in the bread, fire on the meat. Somewhere in the grass, not far, a hotdog. Farther still, a pit. Last night’s ashes, hot.
“Heel,” speaks his beloved.
Yes! Yes. No hotdog. He rockets to her side. They are not at play, they are at work. They are doing. He loves doing, loves to be at his beloved’s side. Loves to sit on the tip of her stiff leather boot when they pause for rest, pause for her to check the small light box, pause to smell the wind and have a drink from the same bottle. She pours it down to him, he catches it like a drainpipe.
When they work he smells her tension. His ears swivel, he stares to calm her. He does not understand what coils her, but he respects it. Her hand comes down, he washes it with a warm tongue. I’m here, we are one, says tongue. When she commands, he is quick. He follows her steps, not a nose past her knee. Until she releases him: “Go.”
Off! Searching, searching for. The best scent, the scent he must. He leaps. His paws slide on pine needles then fly off the forest floor. He explores and then doubles back to his beloved and they look at each other and she nods her chin forward and they continue deeper into the pines, their needles piled tawny and thick, and he pushes a cone with his nose, relishing the punch.
They move deeper, deeper, the forest surrounding them, filtering away the man-made pall. It’s all organic now, humming from the earth.
And then, in the zinging chaos of his nose-mind appears a red streak of scent—the wispy tail of a blazing firecracker drawing him northeast. He looks over his shoulder and sees her follow. He follows scent, like warm hands scratching his belly, his legs spasming him forward.
And then the firecracker erupts! Red and yellow explosions. His body is too tight, too small for this ecstasy. He tells her: Rarff! Rarff! Rarff!
He runs. She trots behind him through another stretch of forest, floor of gold, the tree trunks lines of longitude not obeying any grid, stretching to the overstory. All sounds muffled in the softness above and below, and he goes silent—silent—silent—and then a howl. It slips out, the celebration, but he swallows it. Not yet. But his brain is surging with good-boy electricity: the reward, so near!
Rarff! Rarff! Rarff!
Up ahead, a fallen trunk crosses a rocky dip. He noses his way down, leaving wet traces on the cool stone, mineral haze amidst the fire. His nose touches a digit, then several, dry and thin and lifeless. Smell of iron and decay, a technicolor fog. A pleasure. A Rothko.
Cradle of leaves and bugs. Soft pink polka-dotted shroud. One foot socked, one foot sneakered, both hanging loose on withered flesh.
His nose to the canopy, deep howl from his gut and every muscle vibrates like the strings of a cello, his body a song. Soaring spinning constellation of notes. He sings that he is alive and witness to a world that will someday take him, like the girl, like all living things, one smell turning to another, a whispering trace that persists when the laughter or tears or scraped knee or sweet soft skin that a hand or a paw can touch are all gone away.
SARA GRACE spends at least ten minutes a day spooning her black lab. She (Sara, not the dog) has ghostwritten or edited more than a dozen works of nonfiction. She is thrilled to be making her flash fiction debut in CRAFT. Sara is pursuing an MFA at Warren Wilson College while working on an historical novel about the woman doctor who popularized calorie-counting during World War I. Find her on Instagram @saragracer.
Featured image by Erika Fletcher, courtesy of Unsplash.
