Dog’s Rothko by Sara Grace
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…
Author: Sara Grace
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…
I was underground in Penn Station in New York City when I had the idea for this story. The basement of Penn is under construction, and everybody passing through seems short-tempered and harried. Including me. But while racing to the train, I noticed two police officers with German shepherds, bomb-sniffing dogs who were barking and rearing up on their leashes. They alone seemed to be having a moment of joy and it made me smile. (Until I wondered about a potential bomb.)
As I continued on my way, my mind went to cadaver dogs, trained to link the smell of death with reward. I wondered if I could write a story from a cadaver dog’s point of view that showed this inversion of a human reaction to death and decay—and if I could do it in a way that took readers by surprise.
Flash seemed like the right container. Aside from craft reasons, I wasn’t sure whether I could pull the idea off; knowing that the piece would be short gave me the confidence to try. I ended up writing the story on the train, and then doing two more drafts a few weeks later—one to nitpick the language, and another to clear up some places a reader helped me see I had been too opaque when trying to get the point of view right and release information slowly.
I was working toward two big turns at the end. I started in something like free indirect style, for a playful start, but knew I wanted to pull back the narrative distance, so that I could use language that felt more transcendent than what I’d immediately go to for a “dog’s voice.” (It’s a weird thing to play with—what words would a dog use?) Balancing that narrative voice was tricky, and I have a feeling that anytime I look at this piece in the years to come I’ll see new ways I might have done it.
Finding the right language to describe the body took some finessing. I wanted images that were neutral, both to reflect the point of view and to soften the first turn, the realization of what the dog has discovered. I didn’t want the scene to be so horrifying that I couldn’t make that final lyric turn, the dog celebrating life and the traces left behind.
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.