The screen door banged shut behind them and the terrible scene came into focus. Bits of brown paper soggy with saliva fly-speckling the carpet. Their fat spaniel Leo lounging in the middle of it, staring up at them, his expression one of shame and regret and bewilderment. As Marie staggered toward him, he zoomed away into the dining room where the big table would give him shelter. “What is this—” Marie asked. “What is—”
But then she and Brian understood.
“Shit,” Marie said. “Shit, it’s coffee beans. He got the entire bag of coffee beans.”
Brian wavered, still at the threshold. His own belly was full of salmon, risotto, Merlot. He’d overdone it, if you wanted to know the truth, particularly with the wine, but so far, so good. “I think those are toxic,” he said.
Marie was groping in her purse. “Yes, I know, thank you, Brian. Jesus Christ. What’s the Poison Control number?”
Brian felt the warm, oneiric aura of their dinner at Hyde Park draining away as his wife caromed about the living room, bumping into the bookcase, cursing, kicking futilely at the damp shreds of the coffee bag that, in calmer moments, they’d have deemed Leo’s “feral makings.” This was unfortunate. Brian had sensed, as dessert — a gorgeous flotilla of bananas foster — made its way toward them, that the painful distance of the last few months, since her affair with Tony Baker, tennis pro/scum-lord, had come to light, was finally beginning to dissipate.
“Yes, hello,” Marie was saying, “My dog just ate a bag of coffee beans… How many ounces? Um. I don’t know. A normal bag. A normal bag’s worth.”
Brian found himself at the dining room table, trying to coax the quivering spaniel out. “Hey buddy,” he said. “Hey, you okay?”
“Yes,” Marie was hysterical, “Yes, we’ll pay it. Are you ready for my credit card number?”
Brian cupped the dog’s head in both hands, squatting down, whispering that everything was going to be okay. Marie was rattling off his age, weight, breed. She was starting to hyperventilate. A year ago, Leo had eaten two packs of sugar-free gum and they’d had to take him to the emergency vet. He’d barely made it out of surgery. Now this. Brian, something of a recovering Freudian, referred to the dog’s desire for forbidden foodstuffs as his Death Drive.
Sensing Marie’s panic, Leo began to produce an ominous whine in the back of his throat.
“Hey,” Brian was saying. “Hey now.”
“Hydrogen peroxide,” Marie said, relief seeping into her voice. “Yes, we have it.”
Seconds later, Brian had Leo in a headlock, the dog’s eyes rolling as Marie pried his jaws open and dumped the bubbling liquid down his throat.
An eerie calm descended. Their pulses thrummed steadily, ticking clocks undergirding this liminal scene. Marie held her phone to her ear but said nothing, nor was the operator speaking. Brian rested one hand on the dog’s back. Waiting.
“What do—” Marie began as Leo suddenly lunged before and projectile-vomited black grit across the floor. The reek of stomach acid was sharp and all-encompassing. Marie shrieked and Brian started laughing.
He laughed as Leo charged around the living room, retching. He laughed as Marie trailed after him, trying to lead him to the front door. He laughed as the stinking coffee vomit invaded his nostrils.
He laughed the way he’d wanted to laugh when he approached Tony Baker at Montville Courts, Baker just finishing a lesson with a leggy blonde. The way he’d wanted to laugh when he struck Baker in the face, breaking his nose. The way he did laugh when the blonde screamed as Baker fell. As the security guard, a portly mess of a man, came puffing toward them, an actual taser in hand.
Two months ago, that had been. Two months of sleeping in separate rooms. Of avoiding one another during the day. Two months of free-flowing whiskey and seething rage. His court date was next week. After that, well, who knew exactly. If you’d have asked him over bananas foster if the marriage would withstand his prison sentence, he’d have given a resounding “yes.” Now, such a question seemed to have as much weight as the question of when the universe might decide to stop expanding.
“Shut up, Brian.” Marie was on her hands and knees, scooping handfuls of the coffee-ridden vomit up with paper towels. “Just shut up.”
But Brian, feeling antic and proud and entirely unmoored, wouldn’t give in to the request. Not just yet. Leo had trotted over to his food dish and started barking. The laughing man and the barking dog, both of them staring down at her.
“He’s hungry,” Brian said, a deep, unsettling pain beginning in his own stomach. “He’s hungry again, honey. He’s perfectly okay.”
Kevin Tasker‘s work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Ohio.
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