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Before, there had been dancing, dining, a resort… The half-forgotten problems of the those nights – something involving a fat man and a sauna? – were now stripped of their serious façade and revealed, alas, to be but trivial bumps in what was once an easy road.

After the disaster, my aunt’s semi-Southern home had turned into a shelter of sorts where people gathered to piece together the remains of their lives. My family did not seem to be greatly affected, but countless others were, and she opened her doors to them (though only proverbially, as we stayed steadfastly outside).

We were seated at wooden tables, beneath a canopy of lush trees and creeping vines. It was almost like a party, really – like a slightly white-trash, tragic version of a Renoir patio soiree.

There seemed to be dogs everywhere. Some with owners. Some abandoned. Some mangier than others. All triggering my long-standing phobia, and causing me to cringe, turning away from them with an apologetic “hi” that was anything but inviting.

Adele was the star of the show. He was three years old, blonde, and beautiful. You could tell that his mother must have been beautiful, as well, although she wasn’t here. My mind flashed back constantly to black and white photos I must have seen of him at some point, of his innocent face captured wide-eyed and still. Now shaded with tragedy, the images seemed all the more lavish and intriguing.

We all hoped that his parents had survived and would find their way to him in good time. They lived somewhere like Ohio, but not Ohio, I was told. What did that mean? My aunt tried to explain it to me, but her words fell foreign to my ears, my own trite sense of relevant geography unfamiliar (and uncurious) about places such as those of her description.

At some point Adele was handed a gun. He pointed it nonchalantly at my face while the adults, one holding him in their arms, chatted over-indulgently about their misfortunes. “Who gave the baby a gun?” I asked in frustration, but no one responded. Instead, as they bounced him up and down, the gun swung wildly about, as literally a loose cannon as I had ever faced.

He switched the safety off.

“Adele, could you please put the safety on if you’re going to point that at me?”

He complies. “Thank you, Adele.”

“Ya welcomed,” he responded in his three-year-old style, so sweetly that I felt guilty for having gotten upset.

“Sorry,” I began, “I didn’t mean to be…” Bitchy? An asshole? I could think of no child-friendly language with which to brand myself as someone whose concerns were too self-centered, too regional, too utterly short sighted to have been taken seriously. None of the other adults seemed concerned; children will be children, they likely figured, accidents will happen; you can’t get mad at a three-year-old for almost shooting you in the face. If he had fired, it would have been unfortunate, but any reasonable person would recognize that his or her life was casually expendable.

“I didn’t mean to sound sad,” I said, finishing my sentence awkwardly. For a moment I thought that I hadn’t conveyed my intended meaning at all, but in a strange way it made sense. Besides, Adele wasn’t listening at this point. His attention was focused elsewhere, and I was talking only to myself.

Later on we were seated again as the sun began to set, all of us drinking iced tea and keeping the conversation light. One man’s dog, who had the porcelain-like face of a human girl, was seated with us. Her owner was proudly showing us what she was capable of – waving, dancing, flashing gang signs – all things that he had taught her.

“Pretend that you’re sleeping,” he instructed her.

“What?” she asked (for she could talk), a little distracted by all the attention.

“Like this,” he responded, putting his hands together like a pillow, leaning his skull down towards them, and making a quiet snoring sound.

“It’s hard!” she cried out with a sheepish smile, attempting now to bend her paws as he had his hands and to lay her human face against her beastly arms.

“She has trouble moving her paws like that,” he explained to the crowd. But they kept encouraging her to try. Soon all the adults around the table were pretending to be asleep, as if the en masse repetition of the movement would somehow allow the dog-girl’s mismatched body to be able to follow suit, as if she could be exactly what they wanted her to be if only she’d try her best to be them. Something about old dogs and new tricks drifted through my mind.

“Why is this how you pretend to sleep?” she asked to no one in particular, and was responded to by particularly no one. They were all lost in their hypnotic movements like worshippers drowning in their own projected beliefs.

How absurd, I thought, that the dog-girl was the only one aware that no creature – human, dog, or otherwise – actually sleeps with their hands folded beneath their head, with cartoon snores emitting from their noses and mouths. It was just a symbolic imitation of sleeping. And thus, I realized in a moment of harrowing clarity, the dog-girl was made to mimic humans merely mimicking themselves.

I awoke abruptly, sweating, disturbed. My bed was still there; my apartment was still there; my body, in all its mismatched imperfections, was still there.

The illusion having vanished, I was suddenly very much alone. And despite all my noble imitations, of that fact I was unfailingly aware.

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