Just written

You’re trying to write. Doing it in the living room: that’s your mistake. The husband, the kid, the dogs. Nowhere to go in the outside world. Cafes and restaurants, takeout only. Those are always your haunts. That’s where you go to be you, the purest version of it, really, unencumbered. Except you are always cumbered. Stress makes its home along the slope of your neck, the curve of your shoulders. Especially now.

“Baz,” you say, “stop getting in Jack’s face.”

The signals: swish of a tail, flip of the ears. But the dog is rolling on his back, paws stretched to the sky, and you don’t know what to make of anything anyway.

“Baz,” you say, “just stop it.”

Adam, distracted. Adam, always distracted. “That’s not true,” he says.

Perhaps not. Life, the accumulation of the stories you tell yourself. Nothing more than the truth you believe is factual, or that you make factual. You believe it and so it is.

You don’t know when your house turns into a circus, only that your definition of it sours over time. When Baz is young you post pictures on Facebook, him and the dogs: my circus, 3:23 a.m. Charming, but really, is it ever? A draw-and-quarter of the mind, brain tearing rather than flesh. More painful? More searing? More immutable?

“It’s okay,” Adam says. “I’ve got them.”

This should make you feel relieved. It doesn’t.