Outside the study, panicked dogs assault each other’s hackles. At the fenceline, fine-skinned observers fill their notebooks. The bruised in need, after all, are a wealth of corroborating data. Consider, anyway, what’s the function of panic? Nearby, well-off children make art on their mother’s linen wallpaper. People can take more when they feel safe—no need to tear it all down to studs. Reshape your remnants into rocks, polish or sharpen them as you please. It’s history that stands. Would I lie beneath a brick-stacked door for those who come after me? Is this how the bitten might survive? At the gate, a rustle. At the screen, a whimper. The kids next door decide it’s time for skipping at the river. A flat stone generates lift by pushing the water down.

Two malcontents walk into an animal shelter. Why are they bedraggled? No one expects laughter. The sunflower dress I wore in the founding photo was bought with hope for the future from a failed fashion designer. It’s been strung up in the closet for 10 years, next to a stack of never-unpacked boxes. Just the sanctuary pups. Just the scrubs and blankets. On a quick break I say good afternoon to Dali, an odd survivor-goat in oils. She has two namesakes—one is Dolly the Sheep. If I had a clone, would she have married rich? Bore children, bought an old age somewhat free of suffering? An abstract artist tossed her custom brushes for the voiceless. There’s no punchline here. The joke is always in the details of the day. One day, a bloc of firecrackers blew, sending ash to the dogs unequivocally. My beauty began its relocation inside after that. Only the slender, gold-eyed hounds hold the rights to lasting good looks. It seems animals can forget harms done them. Not forget really, but relocate memory’s houses, redirect the circuits from battered shacks. Maybe it was fine to be a mover, someone else’s chattels always brought unbroken. But how to best that record? They say the hurt go on to hurt others. Bidding, unwittingly, to break their own private chains, some people lobby for assisted homicide. We owe the beautiful beasts at least to help them hide.

What I want is overboard and obvious. What I want is reversal of inevitable. Pushed to giving up, one grows a thin, white spline. One develops hairpin legs. Overboard, obvious, miles of gray fence. I take the miles with me everywhere I go, though I go nowhere. When an artist chooses substrate, the future begins to set. A beach that is a highway is no place for dogs.

The dogs keep sweeping up sand-dirt from the yard and dropping it at my feet. I keep breathing the stardust. It is everywhere I am because they galloped through their new-found lives. They are everywhere I look because they slid through the homes they thought were theirs.