Tragedeigh

Tragedeigh

Joe M McDermott

It was too soon since my dog’s death. I couldn’t stand hearing my family yell at each other about a hypothetical baby. This baby did not exist. Maybe it would; maybe it wouldn’t. My daughter and my wife were each dug into a position and refused to budge and it was really ruining our Sunday dinner, which was supposed to be cooked and eaten at least an hour ago. I didn’t want any part of it, and left them in the kitchen to figure out how not to shout at each other. 

Spooky was gone, now, about a week. Eight days and I had no one to walk in the mornings, or to care for, to sit with and listen to the birds with me. I had wasted a bunch of money trying to get one of the ghost dogs to commemorate her, and no one knew I had done this, not even my wife. Spooky was a black lab I had known since she was a puppy. She was born behind a dumpster at my golf friend’s art studio. She was the only one in her litter that survived Parvo, and she had followed for thirteen years in my shadow and lap before the cancer was found around her spine. There was nothing we could do to keep her alive longer that wouldn’t be worse than the disease, so we let her wind down gently. And it hurt like losing a child. I had never had a dog before and I will want no other, just Spooky and Spooky and Spooky forever. So, I didn’t tell my wife what I did. I said I was taking her to the vet to say goodbye before it got any worse for her. I didn’t want her to suffer. Dogs suffer, but they don’t understand it. They don’t tell you when it’s becoming too much to bear. So we have to decide for them, and I did. I didn’t take her to the vet. I took her to one of the bot shops two towns over, and they scanned her brain and uploaded my videos and pictures into their module. Before she died, she had to go into the terrifying MRI machine and listen to the whirls and machine parts alone, afraid. What awful nightmare had I given her when she was suffering enough? They took blood samples, and died alone and terrified in one of their machines. They said they got what they needed to upload the ghost dog. I paid, and they told me they could arrange for her ashes to be delivered. They haven’t been delivered.

The ghost dog is scheduled this week, and my wife doesn’t know. She’s so caught up in an argument with my daughter that I don’t even understand about a child that does not currently exist. I’m sitting in the music room, listening to records, alone. They’re still arguing. Should they mess with the kid’s DNA or shouldn’t they? How is this even on the table, now, among all the burdens to put on young parents who are never able to be enough, never do enough, and now this? Did you pick the right DNA for your child? Is it your fault they had the wrong DNA? It’s all just too much. I don’t understand it. I just wish Spooky was here to help me forget it.

My name is Jack. My wife is Sophia. We have three kids, a lot for our generation, who mostly didn’t have any, but we were old money on both sides, with oil fortunes and tech fortunes and my grandmother was a pop star, even, back when that could make you rich. The records I listen to in the guest house are older than my grandparents and worth more than people’s houses, and it’s hard for me to take any debate seriously when we are already so blessed. They’re discussing degrees of blessing like it’s life or death: a hypothetical child, that does not exist, and may have custom DNA implanted or may not.

Billy, my son-in-law, who had endured so much shouting and had tried to keep the peace, found me with a cup of coffee. Bringing me coffee must have been his excuse to escape. I took the coffee, but I didn’t want it. I placed it in the sink by the wet bar.

“Mind if I hang out in here with you?” he asked. He was such a big fellow, and the kind of good looks that used to cost an arm and a leg, but he came by them naturally. His parents weren’t rich, like us. They worked in systems maintenance and irrigation. They had callouses and muscles from their work, and this giant son-in-law was their great life’s work. I liked him, fine. He was polite, and appeared hardworking. He wasn’t getting involved, either, and that was smart of him.

I said. “They’re still arguing, huh?”

He sat down in a sofa that seemed small when he was in it, but I had slept on it many nights. Does my daughter want to make the kid smaller than this guy or bigger? What does she even want that his DNA won’t provide?

“They’re arguing quietly, at least, at this point,” he said. “It’s disturbingly silent. Tense.”

“Well, when you catch your breath, I have some really nice gin hidden in a desk somewhere back here, and you can bring it as a peace offering and see if things don’t calm down when they’re drinking.”

“That calms them down?”

“Usually. Sophia is a real mellow drinker and the gin is spiked with a little magic mushroom. Grandma loved those. We kept a bunch for her, and don’t really do anything with it except once in a blue moon. Don’t tell the government.”

“Oh, god, if our obstetrician could hear you…”

“I’m sure she won’t mind if it helps them both relax. Carrie’s not pregnant, yet. You know, alcohol and drugs are responsible for a lot of babies in this world. It might save us a fortune on all that finicky medicine.”

“Not with the IUD. Nothing will work until that’s out.”

“What are they even doing in such a bitter calm? Have they even started dinner? It’s almost nine pm and I’m starving.”

“Supposedly making dinner, now,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m hungry or not, to be honest. That was a lot back there.”

“Huh, well, I’m hungry,” I said. “Want to order wings out from the guest house?”

“You can do that?”

“Heck, yes. How do you think I survived three teenagers? Come on.”

I pulled up the app for the delivery service, and we made our choices. I had preset the location in the guest house years ago and never bothered to change it because my wife could pretend she didn’t know I ordered junk behind her back. And it was a nice walk past the pool and garden to the guest house, which had a pool table, now, instead of a bed. We could rack while we waited and get a few rounds in.

He wasn’t one to read the room, my son-in-law. He went right into it. “Did you and Mrs. Derringer fight this much over having kids?” 

I let him break, and nothing went in. I walked around the table, to find the best angle. I guess I should say something wise. “There were fewer options. It was more binary choices, then. Deal or no deal. Natural kid or adopted kid. Fertility treatments or no treatments. There are too many choices. It makes things harder.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

I took my shot, and whiffed it. I played so much pool and I was still so bad at it.

“You don’t know anything about people. It’s never easy. We have to make it hard or we don’t feel like we took the decision seriously.” Billy sunk two balls on his first shot. He was an electrical engineer for the government before he started his own firm, which wasn’t making very much money, yet, but maybe it would. He had promised to pay me back the startup loan, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

“I feel like I’m in one of those restaurants,” he said. “Like staring at those menus with a million choices and you get so you can’t even decide and just get the same thing you always get and like it. Have you seen the menu at those clinics? What they can offer you?”

“Carrie’s not undecided, and neither is Sophia. What do you always get? What’s your order? Where do you land on the menu when there’s too many choices?”

“Eh. I usually get a pasta thing. I like noodles. With the kid conversation, not my body; not my choice.”

I snorted. I felt like taking a shot. Instead, I doubled our food order. “Kind of a cop out, though. I’m getting you wings. And a separate pizza. Pizza is like handheld noodles. Carbs and sauce.”

“Great. I guess I could almost go for a drink, too, if you got that gin around,” he said. “My opinion stopped mattering about six hours ago. Might as well go on a trip.”

“Me, too.” I had a hidden stash of nice Belgian ales in a secret fridge hidden in the wall behind a picture of dogs playing video games. I offered him a glass. He declined. 

“I was trying to tell a joke. Sorry. I need a clear head when it’s like this. I don’t like those kinds anyway. Too rich. Give me a light beer, and let me keep my head clear.” 

I shrugged and went to pop the cap. “I used to keep sodas in here for the kids. There might still be something in a closet but it won’t be cold.”

“I’m good,” he said. “The doctor wants me sugar free and alcohol free for at least two weeks to maximize our chances. Junk food’s enough of a breach in protocol.”

“Well, here’s to chances,” I said, raising a little glass of an old, resinous dubbel that reminded me of a moonlit night in Vienna. The thing that gets you about money is how nothing is forbidden. Everything can be bought, except good taste. The creature comforts slowly drain away the family’s money until the next generation of children are raised in a shadow world they can never attain, and feel the echo of comfort like deposed kings and queens. I already felt the weight of it, looking at my kids and their choices. Everything costs money. We want to give them the world. I loaned Billy so much for his company, and it is only just solvent. Now, the babies will come, at a price, and their life will be ours to purchase, too, because my daughter will stay at home with the baby and my son-in-law’s firm is only just solvent. Maybe he can make a fortune with it, and maybe the glory days of our line fade away as comforts and time drain us a little bit at a time, slowly. I lost the match quickly, and didn’t feel like playing again. Fortunately, our food arrived before I had to say anything about it. The drone delivered our trash food and we ate and watched the news quietly on an old projector TV.

I didn’t say anything about my introspective visions to my son-in-law. We just ate and waited for something to happen. He won the next round of pool.  He found some room temperature sparkling water in a cupboard, and I drank another beer. Eventually, we both got texts from our wives asking where we were.

“Should we tell them?”

“No,” I said. “Give them a minute to stew while we finish eating.”

“If you could do a designer dog would you? Like, Spooky was the best dog, ever, and you just found her. But would you try to design another dog to be just like her? You still have her DNA around? Her hair? Her toys? Her records at the Vet?”

I didn’t want to tell him what I had done. It would influence a decision that should not be mine to make. At least, I hadn’t done the designer dog thing. I’ve heard too many stories of cancers, behavioral issues. It’s never really the same dog if it doesn’t come from the dumpster behind Terry’s studio on that day on that hour, shivering in the damp cold of early spring storms. Spooky, I will never forget that, and I am so glad I have no picture of that moment of you, sick and afraid and confused and alone. You never felt that way ever again, I hope. Oh, but you did, in the end. Maybe not cold, but probably. Machines are so cold.

“Dogs and kids aren’t the same thing,” I said, trying not to cry, and trying to hide it.

“But would you?” 

“To what end? Purple hair? Purple eyes? What? They purr like a cat?”

“Anything like that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with dogs. Why fix it if it isn’t broken?”

“People do.”

“There’s a big difference between dogs and kids. They’re not the same thing.”

“Why not? People treat dogs like kids?”

“Yeah, but they don’t want grandpuppies that never grow up. They want celibate love lumps that devote their lives to one human. Kids, you want the offspring to spring off, and do their own thing. And don’t put this choice on me, either. We don’t need to talk about it.”

My own words made me ashamed of what I had done to Spooky. I took a long drink and remembered how scared she was at the MRI machine, alone. I closed my eyes and tried to hold it all in. I couldn’t let my own life be the thing that turns the tide in theirs. Not on something where the choices are so monumental. It cannot be a grandparents’ choice when it comes to the children. It could destroy us if we get it wrong.

“Sorry, I’m just confused by the discussion. I don’t think it’s such a big deal, either way, but she and I can’t cover it without help, and she seems so committed to the idea.”

“Huh. Just wait until it comes time to pick a name. You’ll end up with a ‘Tragedeigh’.”

“A what? Why is their name going to be a tragedy?”

“No, like picking a word that isn’t a name and spelling it creatively to be original. The joke nickname for all those Aquorns and Harvists when we made fun of the kind of names people do, now, when we were having kids. People picking weird words and misspelling them to be ‘unique’ for their kids, to make them special. Makes their life difficult and easy to make fun of. Celebrity baby names. Trah-ju-deez.”

“Bullying isn’t tolerated anymore. That’s a thing of the past.”

“Well, it has a place, in moderation. Predators keep a herd healthy. Life is a long game. It’s supposed to last for an endless progression of generations upon generations, and a little predation will protect us from ourselves. Just a little. You want the last chicken wing?”

“No. I think we have to go pretend to eat dinner, soon.”

“Ugh. It is the sacred right of every new parent to mess their kids up their own way. I just want to see grandkids before I upload to the god cloud, whatever that is. You two will figure it out, okay? Whatever is going on in the kitchen, right now, I want no part of it.” I’m afraid to make a decision, too, just like he is. I don’t want this responsibility. I liked having kids the way we did it, and I guess it’s different now, and I will no more recognize the future than my hypothetical grandchild will recognize the past.

My daughter wants to pick genetic variances, custom genes, and give her kids advantages that way, and it’s expensive, and my wife thinks it’s a waste of money unless your kid might have some debilitating disease. Even then. Nature demands all expressions, all options, and the more there are the stronger we are, even if sometimes it hurts more than anything we have ever felt, and the suffering to a child is unimaginable. Maybe those recessive genes are needed for something later? How can we ever know what the downstream impact of narrowing our code to smarter, prettier, stronger, older… 

The inbred nobles of Europe could bleed to death upon a pinprick, and became dumb as brutes. The perfect form of all politicians: fragile, stupid, mean. We think we know better, now? 

Maybe we do.

Maybe.

I finished my beer, and needed help standing up. I made a decision regarding the situation. It was my money and Sophia’s money, and I could decide something different from her if I wanted to, and my poor son-in-law has to live with it, longer than we ever do, and it is a failure as a father not to weigh in. It should be partly his choice, too. I took his arm. “Listen, man-to-man. Listen. Sophie has her money, and I have mine. We both have money. Be the tie breaker, right now. Choose.”

He took a deep breath. He looked down.

I said to him, “I will go in there and make whatever you want happen. She doesn’t have to know. Neither of them do.”

He looked at his hands. He spoke like he had shrunk three sizes in my gaze. This is the power of money and age. I have reduced this boy. He is diminished. His words were soft and weak. “My kid will be born into a world of kids who are smarter and faster and stronger because the tech is there,” he said. “How can our kids compete? We can try to keep it kind of in the family like expressing the genes that are there, already, and evaluating close family genes for things we could enhance a little. We don’t have to give the kid purple eyes and pointy elf ears.”

“Okay,” I said. “A middle road. A very expensive middle road. Okay. Let’s go make it happen. Let me handle it. You can pretend to be neutral. Take your wife’s side no matter what. Whatever side that is. I’ll take the heat from both the women and from you even if I live in the guest house on takeout for the rest of my life.”

I patted his shoulder. 

I thought about Spooky, again, and she would come back to me in metal and plastic and faux fur that would be almost indistinguishable from a real dog. She would sit with me in the guest house and watch me and bark and push her head into my hands for attention. She would catch frisbees from the air and pretend to keep it away from me before dropping it for another throw. She would remind me every single day of what I was willing to do because I was too chickenshit to say goodbye. And when I was ready, I could turn her off.

We storm like lions, we rich and proud and lazy and brilliant men and women, and we are such cowards.

We are all such cowards.

I patted Billy’s shoulder again. I knew his company would never take off, and I’d never see a dime, and this dream palace of generational money built by so many lions was going to fade away into the crowds of men and women, and nothing of their great lives of leisure was worth what it cost.

 

Sonnet #385

 If feet could explain the work they do

To hands who explain the work they do

To elbows who explain the work they do

To livers who explain the work they do

To you, the economy would make sense

But it wouldn’t be accurate. Every prince

In their beating heart dreams of settlements

Beyond the borders of time, an echoing lens

Measured in rings around the thumb

Where the callouses grow and grow numb

And only machines can capture all the dumb

That we regenerate believing we know someone

And machines will build machines to explain

Why we will never know anything again

Next book showing up “forthcoming”

 Thrilled to be working with the fine folks at Aqueduct!

Wind of Earth, Wind of Tau Cetiby Joe M. McDermott (2026)
ISBN: 978-1-61976-286-2
EISBN: 978-1-61976-287-9

https://www.aqueductpress.com/forthcoming-pubs.php

Sonnet #384

 There is no money in the arts, so surrender

To all the people who tell you there is no money

In the arts, and isn’t it better to be rich and safer

In gated communities with high end grocery

Stores, and people that come to do all the hard things

Washing windows, mowing lawns, staying up late

To sit with your baby when they are sick so nothing

Breaks your peaceful dreams, and companies sate

All your ideations. And when you retire you can write

Wait until then, and work until then, and when your

Body doesn’t work right anymore, and doctor’s

Appointments become a part time job; then, pour

Your heart into your dreams, at last, at last, if there’s time

If you have purchased enough time; pray for enough time

Sonnet #383

Whole passages of the Bible are just sons

A list of sons after sons, a lineage of boys

I know the women were ignored or just toys

But that’s culture not god not holiness and when

The holiest of books just lists out names of people

Remember their names, some with no stories, 

Just a mark of ink to obituary and connect blurry

Half-remembered retold things attached to people

And the learned wisdom of these great men 

Accumulated from kitchen tables and late nights

Lying awake and talking and remembering then

Doing mundane things, cooking, eating, fights

Over stupid things no one even remembers

The holiest books carry these gaps forever

Sonnet #382

 If I can lose a part and not lose myself,

That part must not be part of me, just shells

And machinery, the illuminations of the kells

Were not the book, just an ornament to sell

The story, and I wonder if my individuation

In all this noise that is not me requires filigree

Of form a timbre of voice a gestured smile and free

For any mark of memory to come from

Aye, the story of the man is not the story of the hand

But the story of what I do with it, yet

Without the hand, without the eye, and 

Without the voice, I am still myself, but you

See a tree that falls in the forest must be witnessed

For what use is self without the rest of the forest 

I heard a rumor poets made a liv-

ing once upon a time from writing po-

ems from an adjunct at the univers-

ity who drove me to the airport term-

inal and asked me for a tip

and i asked the internet while waiting for

my plane if this was true and learned

that only in the last one hundred years

has any thought been given to the worth

of poetry unless it was a wealthy patron

these days patrons buy the news and sell

our hearts to us in crypto tokens

i understand we've trained a soup of words

that will teach us what we think and feel now

i get on the plane, and read, alone in a crowded station

where we are, all of us, waiting in our own heads

Sonnet #381

 Take all your clever children teach them

Math and make them read the greatest books

And tell them that the future is their story, look

At all the amazing things you can be! Then,

Put them to work and nothing is possible

Suffer first, earn the right to scrub and toil

Smile on demand, authentically, too, boil

Water for ramen and make highways uncrossable

Sing them great love songs but give them no love

Tell them they’re never going to be able to do enough

Tell these brilliant children they’re never the stuff

That dreams are made of, and life’s hard, all the above

These children who were taught since birth to dream

And then march and die in someone else’s machine

Sonnet #379

 Give a man a fish and let him eat for a day

Don't believe the lie of a lifetime of fishing

This is an excuse for the rich to keep riching

Until the belly is full the words will not stay

The only word hunger learns is please, please...

You hold this power over others: they remember

And when their belly is full, at last, late November

The fire at your hearth will seem to tease

It would be, in their mind, fair for you to freeze

Fair for you to know the fear in the bones

When children look up and cough and wheeze

And the car doesn't start and the sticks and stones

that they carry inside will grumble and heave...

Feed a man first. Then, lead him towards a home.

Sonnet #378

 The frost on the grass won’t kill the grass

The soft moon curls of deer hooves do not kill

The damp leaves might if they stay damp and still

But they will dry out and blow away and ask

So little of the lawn, eventually the hibernation

Will not kill the grass, the sweeping sheets 

of  freezing rain will not kill the grass, the insect eat

Beneath the roots does not kill the grass, the station

Of the sun that bends away from earth kills no grass

The howling winds blow over their sharp heads

The leaves we see look dead as doom brown grass

Where green we long to see is gone, this leads

What looks like rebirth in spring that’s only grass

Always living, always reaching among the flower beds

Do Something Viral While the World is Burning

 Working in the arts while the world is *gestures at all that* means you sort of wish the arts wasn't eating itself, too. 

We are tasked as creative professionals with art to sell and bills to pay in this burning world to create things that will cut through the noise, and hop onto a signal that never stops running until the echo of our work is as loud as a memory for people who don't even know we exist.

The world is burning. Make art. Make viral content to promote the art. Repeat until the world either stops burning or finishes burning.

Hikikomaurice

 

I can’t remember the last time I spoke with someone in person. I don’t know why I thought about it today. It was a lovely day, simply the best. The weather in my little dome was set for 67 degrees with just a touch of moisture in the air for my pores. I had my espresso by the pool, and projected a livestream from the Great Barrier Reef on the bottom. I love watching the colorful fish when I’m not yet fully awake. I played a little Mozart app to try and measure my mood from my biometrics and play Mozart music to promote calm. It was playing the Magic Flute, which is generally a good sign for my day. I was supposed to clock in and work today, but the company network was down, so all we had was an insecure Zoom meeting later to update on the fix progress. Really, I could have done anything. I was safe in my little dome, and my food delivery was yesterday, and the garden boys were making perfect tomatoes for me that would ripen later in the afternoon. I could walk among them, if I liked, and pluck them myself, or set the bots to do it. I thought I might like walking around a little. The fitness app encouraged it, and I’d need less time on a treadmill later. It was nice to take a break from the treadmill, if I could. I had a virtual meetup with a nice young lady in Borneo scheduled in two days and maybe she and I would click and merge our habitats and make babies. I was looking forward to our scheduled session. Everything was perfect today. Really, the best and only getting better every day.

And I had not spoken to someone in person since…

Obviously, I had family. I had a mother and father that divorced when I was fifteen, and I went to the city school after so I had to be there in person with all the rest of the kids who couldn’t afford the network. I made lifelong friends there, didn’t I?

Didn’t I? The last time I had seen Jack and Hakeem in person was… I think it was a drifter job in college. We were paid peanuts to go use metal detectors in old cities and pull anything metal we found for scrap that hadn’t already been pulled. Mostly it was for cleanup. It was hard, sweaty work, and the suits were heavy and terrible and I swore I would never have to work like that again. I committed myself to school. We still met up, Hakeem and Jack and I, to play this cool spelunking game, and sometimes we had poker nights, but I think Jack uses an app to cheat so we kind of stopped playing poker. Co-op only. And we just had a session, didn’t we? We did. We did last weekend.

Right, but it was virtual. I looked around my beautiful little dome house designed like an Ancient Roman bath. I could slip into different temperature pools in every room. I could ship in different scents and salts and soaps. It was a very popular model. All that elegant travertine and water filtration. It broke once, early on, but it was under warranty and the repairmen got to it and he worked only on the outside pipes, beyond my little dome, so I never actually met him in person. 

When did I last meet another person in the flesh?

Was it college?

I was nearly thirty. It couldn't have been that long ago.

It bothered me. I don’t know why, but it did.

I was eating avocado toast for lunch and wondering when I last saw someone in person. Yesterday, I didn’t think of it at all, and today it just hit me out of nowhere.

My neighborhood was pretty exclusive, so there weren’t a lot of people who qualified for it. Most of the plots were still vacant. My closest neighbors were about half a mile west. I had their number somewhere. They were an older couple, with great-grandkids and their photo on the HOA website had two cute dogs. I didn’t know if the dogs were real or not, but they looked real in the pictures. I thought about calling them, but they wouldn’t necessarily take that as a reason to come over just because. It wouldn’t work. They would be confused why I was asking to see them inside their house, all of a sudden. I had to come up with an excuse, some reason. I went outside because I was curious. I got lost. How could I get lost? My batteries died. I needed a charge and maybe some tea before I left and walked back home. Something like that. Perhaps I cut my leg near their dome when I’m out for a stroll? I’ll lose a shoe in the bushes. 

I was pushing through a densely brushed drone trail when I realized I didn’t bring any water or food. I may not need to invent an emergency when I arrive.

The sky was the color of wet concrete, and cool and damp. The drone trail was made of crushed rocks and it sounded hard under my expensive shoes. I was undoubtedly tearing up the rubber. Mud clumped in the treads. At home, I’d need to wash them or throw them away. My soft linen pants were already scraped a bit in the long fingers of undergrowth that reached into the thin trail’s pathway. No drones were scheduled today, I thought. It was a special order day only. And tomorrow was a trash and maintenance day, when the machines came through our HOA to clear out our bins and cut away any grass or weeds in the crushed rocks. The path was the width of the widest drone, which wasn’t much wider than I was, and the branches that reached in had been stripped and stripped and stripped of growth until they were just sharp, hard fingers. Not even spiders bothered to nest in these bent branches. I felt like an idiot. I should simply go home, forget my little strange impulse. I could turn around and return to the reality of my life, my job and travertine baths and espresso under a clean , Tuscan sun. I turned around and looked at my house from the outside. It was a hard, round thing. It had been built in a factory and delivered by helicopters to this far corner of the world, where crime and beggars and scavengers were never to be found. The hard black metal was coated in reflective materials to keep any stray heat from the outside sun, keep any birds from nesting. A perfect black ball of home. Along this trail, I knew there were more like it. We were a community of neighbors that only talked on a message board about trash collection, trail maintenance, and stormwater runoff. We did not know each other, in person. 

I heard sounds in the trees: the rustling of birds. They did not sing, just flutter through. I looked at them; they bent their heads towards me as they alighted there and there. They were brown and black things, only curious at most about the man that walked where drones usually rumbled through the rocks. I called out to them like the birds in my house. “Sing for me, birds. I would like to hear your quiet, lovely songs.”

They flew on, their scattered herd of hunters and seekers always moving and moving, since the age of the dinosaurs, they stopped only long enough to make an egg. And I, a cryptid to them, a forgotten thing, out among them on these drone trails. They will whisper about me later, perhaps. They have a language in their songs. AI had decoded parrots and crows and rooks  already. Farther on, the trees dropped away. Signs of burned earth, and a cracked tree that once towered high above the others. I think I remembered this from a newsletter. There was a forest fire here, but the HOA’s safety protocols put it out before it could spread. Emergency drones dumped extinguisher all over this place. It would take decades to fully heal, but it wouldn’t burn. It was larger than I thought it would be, and much closer to my house than I realized. I sat down on an exposed rock, and rested. My feet hurt. I was feeling some blisters. These were not shoes for loose gravel trails. They were for treadmills and exercise equipment. They were waterproof, so I could just jump straight into a pool without removing them. I removed them now. I checked my feet for blisters, and found them pooling around the edges of my heels. I rubbed them and frowned. 

Into the clearing, a deer walked out without fear. Behind it two more deer followed, all does. One looked younger than the others, still with an echo of spots, but this late in the season, she was almost grown. I marvelled at them, in the real. They did not know me. They sought the leaves that pushed through the edgelands, where the brush was easier to reach. It was probably poisonous for them, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was a slow poison. They would have many seasons to let the chemicals from the extinguisher swell in them. The coyotes would be hurt more. They might eat enough in one season to truly die, but that was fine. Coyotes were a menace. They wrecked trash bins and water lines if given a chance, and sometimes struck the grocery drones. 

I almost wanted to pet a deer, but I knew they had ticks. I knew they had diseases. Already my nose was leaking a little snot from the dust and pollen in the unfiltered air. Imagine, touching wild animals and getting sick and finally meeting people in person at a hospital after an airlift.

I had no water, and I had already come so far. 

I got up, and walked on down the path. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and a few thin drops of rain struck for just a moment before passing. I hadn’t even checked the weather before I took my impulsive stroll. That’s how long it had been since I had been regularly outside. I had forgotten the importance of checking the weather.

As I approached the dome, I heard the dogs barking at the door. I rang and stood back where the cameras could see me. The house was indistinguishable from mine on the outside, but who knows which model they chose. Jungle paradise or mountain cabin or any city skyscraper were all nearly as popular as the Roman model I chose. Mine was the most expensive one, so I chose it. It was hard to imagine dogs around all those open pools of water. Their hair would clog the filters, and their wet fur would stink everywhere. They probably didn’t have the same thing I did. I rang the bell again. The dogs kept barking. They didn’t sound very large. I rang the bell one last time, and there was no answer. I waited.

The rain started again. And it was going to get worse. The thunder and lightning were crackling hard. I pulled up my phone and tried to call them, but there was no answer. The rain was starting to fall in long sheets. I rattled the door handle, and it opened. It was unlocked. 

Inside; the dogs barked and barked. They jumped all over me. These tiny puffballs of tan and poofy and claws nearly knocked me over with their barking and jumping. I sat down with them and let them check me out. One was wary and aggressive. The other was curious. I called out. “Hello? Anyone home? The door was unlocked. Sorry for barging in like this. I’m your neighbor, and I got caught walking in the rain. Hello?”

There was no answer. 

“Hey, this is Maurice from one house over! I’m not trying to be an intruder,” I shouted. “I was ringing the bell and knocking. I found the door was unlocked, and I was getting soaked outside. I just hope I can dry off a bit and get some water to drink before I head back home. Hello?”

I stood up. The dogs had calmed a little. One still didn’t trust me, but the other was my friend. They looked nearly identical. They were just tiny things with flattish faces, and big, expressive eyes, and fur that was soft and silky smooth and a little long. I followed them into the house. It was a mountain model, with vistas and horizons of pine and snowcapped peaks. The floor was a hard, slate, into softer woods past the entry. It was cooler than my house, but perhaps that was just the wet clothes. 

It was a strange thing, standing in someone else’s house. They had more furniture than me. There was two of them, so it made sense, I guess. I didn’t know where things were. The mountain cabin had a yard and there was a garden, there, with flowers that looked real. I walked out to their flowers, calling out for them. I didn’t know where the terminal interface was. I used my phone to call them, and see if anyone answers, but no one answers. I just want to dry off in the sun a little, and get a glass of water, and maybe go home, to my warm salt pools and Tuscan sun. I could be fined for this incursion. I could be arrested and marked a criminal for this. I just wanted to meet someone in person, and now I’ve broken into my neighbors’ house.

I called out that I was going to get a glass of water and just check the weather and see if the storm has passed, if that was all right. 

In the kitchen, the refrigerator was hanging open. Confused, I walked over to it and sought to close it, but I couldn’t.

One of my neighbors was knelt down inside, with their head planted into the machine, cold and dead and surrounded by food the dogs had been tearing into. There was too much mess and trash for me to tell which frail elderly neighbor it was with their head face down on a shelf.

“Oh,” I said. I looked around, then, to try and find out what had happened here. I started searching through the rooms, looking for the other one, but no one else was there. I found mail piled up in the package receiving area. One of the boxes was from a funeral service, and it was heavy enough to be something to carry ashes inside. I put it down. I looked over at the dogs.

“Well, pups,” I said. “We have a problem, don’t we?”

The friendly looked up at me with a big doggy tongue-loose smile. The other one was sideways, with their tail tucked in.

“I see one of you gets it,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss, both of you. You didn’t deserve this. I don’t know much about dogs, but I know you can’t care for yourselves. You can’t be set loose, or the coyotes will get you, if you don’t starve first.” I looked up what to do. I didn’t know if they had any children willing to take the little creatures in. I sighed. “If you’re even real. Are you real, or part of the house?”

I petted the friendly one. It felt nice. It felt real enough. I had forgotten how lonely I was, with just people on screens. I had forgotten what it felt like to hold something that was alive.

Authorities would need to be called, and they’d ask me questions, but if I didn’t steal anything, I doubt anyone would care. A glass of water. A moment out of the rain. The door was unlocked. I found the body in the kitchen, and the poor dogs.

Rummaging around a bit, I found some leashes and collars in a coat closet. The dogs knew what they were. I wasn’t going to leave them here, with the dead. I would care for them until someone claimed them, and hope no one did. I put leashes and collars on them. I didn’t know what their names were. I called one Grumpy and the other Dopey, like the dwarves, and set out for the door. I pulled up the authorities on my phone, and thought maybe I could just have the house do it, and I don’t have to be involved once they see I didn’t take anything. But I was taking something. I was taking the dogs. I sighed.

I called the hotline, and the agent asked me my emergency. I said I discovered my neighbor’s door was unlocked, and found him in his kitchen, dead. I was going to take his dogs with me until someone could come to take them where they need to go. The agent thanked me for the alert and informed me that they were sending a unit to investigate. 

At the door to the outside, the dogs stopped hard. I scooped Dopey up in my arms, and tried to scoop Grumpy, but he pulled and ran off too well. Still, I had the leash, so I could pull. I pulled. I pulled. I crossed the threshold of the doorway, and… The dogs froze. 

They weren’t real.

Maybe the animals were based on dogs they had owned, once, and loved, but they were part of the house. I took the leash and collars off the dogs. I held the old, worn-in fabrics to my nose. They smelled real, like real wet, dusty walked dogs. I guess the dogs were dead, too, and these fabrications were there to keep a lonely man company close to death. I put it all back inside the house. Once past the threshold of the door, the dogs were barking and alive again. I left them there, and pulled the door closed. In the distance, I heard the rumble of approaching authorities. I did not want to talk to them. These were not going to be people, just drones driven by people, so no emergency worker gets hurt in an emergency.

I walked home, alone, miserable and empty. My whole body hurt and I got rained on again when I got home. Inside, my perfect Tuscan sun greeted me, and I stripped and fell into a warm salt bath and ordered the kitchen to make me two burritos and a pitcher of iced tea.

The sky outside was gray and sad, and this projection of a place and time was not real, and the ocean was not over the hill, and the vineyards were just a figment. I knew the comfort I felt was so far away from the harsh rocks and brush outside my little dome. I had forgotten, hadn’t I? 

 The machines that ran my house did not like to be turned off, and told me it was not good for them to be turned off. 

Alone, the empty screens all faded to black. The water went still and calm. I breathed and waited and tried to remember what it was I was supposed to remember before I forgot even that which would guide me to the hole where an unknown thing was absent.

I hadn’t been in the same room with a living thing for such a long time.