CW: blood, medical violence, vomiting

By the third week his testicles are hard and shriveled like raisins to the touch. He screams and kicks as I untwist the three extra-strength rubber bands from around his scrotum, just as he had screamed three weeks earlier when I put them on and a week before that when I clipped the withered stem of his umbilical cord. Screams are his only language, and his only word is a single earsplitting demand for attention. He need not worry. I’m always ready to acquiesce, bending over my son’s nest of paper towels in the sink, rubber nipple in one hand and scalpel in the other.

When I finish the operation, I set to work changing the paper towels. He watches me from the countertop, no longer screaming. I speak to him, enunciating each word with care as though I were engraving it on the membranes of his brand new ears.

“When I was a boy, not that much older than you, what I wanted most in the world was my very own puppy. My mother said I was too young and not nearly responsible enough. So I read all the books in the Children’s Section about puppies, then all the books about dogs, and then all the books with dogs in them. 

“I gave the owner of the local pet store half my lunch money so he would let me into the newspaper-floored puppy enclosure. Every day after school, I clambered over the gate of the puppy pen, and they were on me. The puppies leapt onto my shoulders and bowled me over. They licked my hands and face and then licked out my ears and nibbled them with sharp puppy teeth. One puppy would stand over my chest, biting at my hands whenever I moved them. I had puppies all over me, their warm fur pressing into my face. My mother complained to the school board twice about the bully beating me up during recess. 

“And late one night, I slipped out of the house in my fur-covered shirt. With the sheet from my bed, I bound my calves to my thighs so I could walk on hands and knees without having to crawl. I sniffed out a pile of deer scat, ate until I threw up, and then ate my own vomit.”

I drop the last bloody napkins into the trash and tamp down a layer of fresh paper in the newly-rinsed sink. Outside, dusk settles on the garden. In the two months since I’ve pruned them, the lilac hedges have smothered the tulips and crocuses in a purple avalanche of sprawl. My baby starts screaming again as I lift him into the sink and end my story for the night.

“That,” I tell him, “is when I knew I had what I wanted.”

* * *

For the rest of the year, the bushes gorge themselves upon the yard, and the oaks grow hippie-bearded with ivy. I’m busy in the kitchen, pruning my child. He’s infinitely more delicate than the bushes’ tangled fibers, so soft and white I feel I’m operating on a naked brain that unfurls like a lily under my scalpel. He screams and screams, but when he tires, I tell him how the garden will look when we plant it again with anemones and tiger lilies and reinstate the honeysuckle upon the trellises it once enlaced.

I’ve looked up from removing some over-sensitive bits of his inner ear to find that it was past midnight, forcing me to recalculate my sleeping patterns. Once, I caught myself whistling a tune whining up from a distant pool party. Perhaps I’ll have a celebratory bottle of red to go with my nightly ¾ cup of oatmeal. No! These thoughts shatter my order. Things could spin out of control. And I’m so close. So close to safe.

* * *

That August I repair the sprinkler system. My son toddles after me, lurching under the weight of the metal plates I have embedded in his thighs. He’s nearly three and learning to walk. He knows the names of many of my tools from our sessions over the bathtub (he’s already too big for the sink) and fetches the implements I call for from my toolbox on the patio.

“Wrench,” I say, and he grabs a screwdriver. I touch a button on my controller, and he flinches at the spark of electricity that nips through his collar. “Wrench.”

By the time I’ve filled the sprinkler with a concentrated roundup solution and set it spraying, he’s learned the names of all the tools. I pat his head. His hair has mostly grown back, and it’s soft and straw-colored like mine.

The sea of vegetation feasts on the Roundup, and we watch all through the winter as it yellows and dies. I teach my son how to work the electric lights and the proper times for each one to be on and off. In the spring, he helps me build a fence, eight-feet high with wooden slats, around the garden perimeter. With the bushes gone, I can glimpse bikers whooshing by. My son doesn’t notice them. His lenses have been shaped so that can he can see little beyond the trees that ring the rest of our yard. That summer he graduates to a larger collar.    

Over succeeding springs we plant the garden. I walk down the rows with him, teaching him the names of the flowers and where and when each must be planted. It seems that whenever I’m not bending to the dirt to uproot a weed, I’m working on yet another collar or replacement part. Sometimes I feel like taking a long nap but stop myself. If I upset the proper order, who knows what might befall? I might abandon my son and wander down the empty highway in search of the wind. 

* * *

I finish the final collar and press the controller button that calls my son in from the garden. This collar is black and thicker than any of the others, the imbedded electronics making angular bulges in the rubber. My son enters, now almost as tall as I am. He bows his head as I undo his collar.

“When you were smaller, I told you part of a story, and now I must finish it,” I say. “Each day after the first night on all fours, I would set up training courses in the woods in the back of our house and scrawl commands in the leaf-litter. Each night my puppy would escape the house, calves bound to its thighs, and gallop to the back woods. The puppy didn’t always want to do tricks. Sometimes it squirmed through the brambles to chase skunks or sniffed around the compost heap. But there were biscuits for rewards. And thorns. And nails, nails that were easy to hide in the daytime but were invisible in the dark. 

“So the puppy learned to sit and play dead and bark on command. It learned to shake hands and beg. It learned things no other puppy ever learned: how to walk on its hind legs; how to talk; how to look into the mirror and comb the fur on its head. And one day, as I looked at the reflection in my mirror, I did not know whether I was seeing the little boy or his puppy. And to this day I still don’t know.”

I passed the controller to my son and then placed his hands on the heavy collar. I don’t know whether my fingers guided my son’s hands or whether his hands had carried my own palms along with them as the collar closed around my neck. The dark ring came down on my shoulders with all the weight of a halo of puppy down.