The Retch
Originally published in Mid-American Review Volume XLII, no. 2
Colten Dom
There are hooks made of sound: the slap of sex, the generic jingle of the nightly news, or the cacophony of your husband sneezing. There are the pop song snippets of adolescence, guitar licks that drag you back to high school. And jaunty radio realty commercials, dropping through time to mom and dad and the typical divorce, leaving your childhood toys behind to guard the leaky attic where they became toothpicks for a family of raccoons.
But of all the hooks, all the audio-memory in Queenie’s lifetime library, the most parturient was the retch. Jerked from sleep, she stared into the bedroom’s purple dark, brain lubricating—a second retch yanking her off the mattress, raking her nails across her husband’s chest, and smashing on the lights. Tacky sheets corded with intercourse unstuck from her navel, piling around her feet.
Bee, an elderly Cocker Spaniel, grimaced from the doggy bed. The canine choked, tongue curling like a coat hanger down a shower drain. Extending her neck, she vomited on the carpet.
*
With a kid on each hip and a lifetime of dogs, Queenie had developed a nearly telepathic antenna for the retch. Ron, doe-eyed husband and occasional lover, programmer by quiet day and armchair connoisseur by exhausted night, likened her extrasensory ability to a subsonic mathematics, introducing the concept, regrettably, at any number of dinner parties. Constant, complex equations rumbled between Queenie’s temples; with outcomes subconsciously cascading and her ears perked for the slightest gag, she could usually, usually, catch it before it happened.
But, three nights later, Bee was still throwing up. All Queenie could do was scramble behind her with a caravan of towels, the children pointing to fresh discoveries like weathered signposts on some ancient hallway trail—Retch Cassidy and the Stained-Knee Kid.
"What’re we going to do?" she asked the bedroom ceiling. “Hardwood?” As if Bee wasn't laying in the corner, staring.
"You walk her, the kids walk her." Ron grunted his socks around a brick of toes, let them fall onto a carpet stained the asynchronous shades of a community garden. "I dunno what she ate."
Bee leapt off the floor, half a sock promptly disappearing up her snout. Queenie rolled her eyes. “At least put them where she can't, y'know."
And the next morning, even with the crayons, hairbands, and socks hunted from the ground, Queenie discovered the ankles of her nursing scrubs trailing in another puddle of sick. Choking down dry toast and a boiled egg, her pre-dawn, pre-traffic escape had been lethally delayed. An irrecoverable blow to her favorite time of day: waking behind the wheel in the middle of the highway, equidistant between home and hospital as the first fingers of dawn crushed the night across the mountains. Pushing and pulling through the sea of cars, she could still smell the barf on her trouser hem.
*
On the sixth day, mysterious solids entered Bee’s bile. When Queenie plucked a misshapen figure from the living room floor and drowned it in the sink, she found herself staring at a well-chewed but altogether familiar doll. Entire plates of skin had been digested, revealing a plastic substrate; Frankenstein hinges lurked in the pivotable elbows and anorexic torso. After hours of lamplit study in her husband’s armchair, Queenie came to recognize the damaged face of her childhood toy, abandoned to the attic of a house her parents sold two-and-a-half decades ago.
She could have written it off as a case of mistaken doll, even a bout of vomit-induced lunacy until Ron dragged himself into the bedroom with another dripping mess: his beloved stuffed rabbit received at age four, burned to death in a campfire at age six. Past the puke, there was an undeniable perfume of smoke.
Over the next twenty-four hours, her grandfather’s slippers appeared, then her mother’s copper spatula. Then came the keys to her college apartment, the bulky battery cap of her first vibrator. Ron’s wasted baseball glove emerged, as did a near-gelatinous pack of Pokémon cards. It started unnerving even the children who, resilient to most of the world’s weirdness, began rationally panicking when their dog disgorged a golf club or an intact model ship.
*
On a rare day off, with the kids away at school and counting down the hours before summer break, Queenie discovered a clutch expelled atop her and Ron’s airing mattress. Small fleshy balls like the roe of some enormous salmon, dripping, shiny, spotted by old blood—warm to the touch, with the texture of a flayed grape and the smell of a leather armchair gone rancid in the rain.
Gathering the orbs into her arms, standing in the sun, she glanced down to make certain of her embrace. Inside one of the globes, something twisted. Biting off a yelp, Queenie winced over to the couch and dumped them. Armed with a tea towel, she gingerly pincered a ball, felt it flex beneath her fingers. She drew closer.
They were translucent; holding one up to the light like some eerie View-Master, Queenie saw a wintry backyard. Dropping it, she raised another to her eye, looked through at a summer’s day, or what she could see of it. The vision was half-eclipsed by a giant red semicircle. A frisbee.
In the next, a dim scene. Queenie peered, entranced, witnessing a mattress from the perspective of a dog’s well-worn pillow. Atop the sheets, two figures froze, mid-copulation—one familiar, the other unfamiliar. Queenie dropped the ball; it scattered into the rest. She gathered the panoramas into a plastic Chapters bag and left them on the porch like a sack of chestnuts.
That evening, the first truly hot night of the summer, Ron came in from the dark like a skipping stone. He washed his hands in the kitchen sink, staring at Bee draped across Queenie’s stomach. Through the kids’ bedroom door Queenie saw blankets hanging, tossed off of hot feet like folded napkins.
“Did you look through all of them?” she asked.
“No.” They watched each other.
“I don’t know how it’s my fault?” she whispered into the dog’s neck.
“Is it? Maybe at first.” Stumbling over, he took her reluctant hand. “But we’re past some bad chicken now.”
*
The next morning, Queenie searched the house for puke or orbs in vain. Orchestral joy sang through her, wondering if she’d seen the last of the flood. Only to discover Bee in the basement, hunched between the washer and the dryer.
A metallic web, dripping with sputum, hung in the crevice. Bizarre radials spun out from a whorled center, attaching to the concrete, the appliances, and the basement wall like soldered iron. The fibers glimmered a patina of green and coral, the colors of acid-washed steel, in the bare-bulb light.
Over the lengthening days, the web slowly grew up the stairs, clinging like dust to the corners of their tiny kitchen. Ron took to prepping the kids’ lunches in the bathroom, concerned over the sanitary quality of Bee’s “regurgitated iron.”
And Queenie finally witnessed a retch, a technicolor yawn, far less violent than she had imagined—the web unspooling from Bee’s jowls like a folding chair, floating and settling as she waddled.
*
“I’ve never done this before,” Queenie breathed over the phone. Nervous—her family had lost religion somewhere in the Dust Bowl.
“It’s okay,” the exorcist whispered back. “We’ll be careful.”
But when the older woman walked in and saw the silvery metal and sopping vomit, she turned like a pinwheel.
Queenie caught her heaving against the porch. “Can’t you do something? Say something?”
“That’s a dog, ma’am. A sick dog.”
“But,” Queenie scrambled, “didn’t the pope say dogs go to heaven now?”
The exorcist shook her head. “Not that one.”
*
Bee’s banishment to the yard came without the pain of cold nights. In the surrounding homes, their neighbors led normal lives—playing on their iPads in blow-up pools, roasting veggie burgers on begrimed barbeques. They hardly failed to notice the steely cocoon creeping around Queenie’s home, reaching into the gutters and licking the chimney. Fortunately, the spectacle spawned wonder rather than horror. They were suddenly the family with the “new dog.” But they’d had Bee for years, Queenie protested to postmen and passing realtors. Since before the kids were born. She dozed in the sun’s glow, exhausted and wary, eyeing the leashes wrapped around the wrists of the neighborhood wives, the husbands screwed to their waists.
With each addition to the glittering structure, each horrific and sleep-tearing retch, Bee became increasingly radiant. Her gold, wedding-ring fur grew dense and glossy. Her hooded eyes lost their dopey gauze, her doggy pupils sharpening as she watched Queenie through the windows of the house, as if seeing her go about her daily life had gained some rare, bemusing quality.
*
Constantly, Ron tried to speak. With the kids out playing during daylight hours, the dim house became a labyrinth. He tried hooking her attention with groans, anonymous movements of the mouth, a conversation paraphrased in silence. Outside the vomit-fettered windows, Bee blew bubbles and coughed hairballs of steel twine. Inside, Queenie was trailed by a shadow that muttered and murmured and kept all the bedroom doors locked.
After work, she took to sitting in the car, waiting in the driveway with her hand on the ignition, listening to the engine gurgle. Despite three consecutive washes, a stench continued to rise from the edge of her scrubs. On the radio, a cheery ad pealed out—not words, just vowels, consonants. Glottal collections of noise and implications. Her house key lay pressed against her thigh.
Outside the car, Labradors, Border Collies, Retrievers and Huskies slunk along the yard fence, yapping and bickering and biting at one another. Countless canines sniffing, soaking her driveway in urine. From the yard, there was a muted howl. The dogs pressed against the slats. She listened to the engine.
*
After one particularly gory nightshift, she returned home to find that Ron, and the kids, had disappeared. Plugging in her dead cellphone, she discovered a voicemail in which her husband, bursting with action, ranted that he was escaping with the children, taking them to his terrible parents on Vancouver Island. He wasn’t leaving her. He just didn’t want to argue.
And when I come back, he giggled into the phone, we can take care of the dog.
Exhausted, Queenie poured a glass of wine before seeking the cool night of the porch. Bee bounded up, beautiful and puppylike. Queenie scratched behind her organic ears and meaty shoulders. She massaged the furred back, wondering what strange and incredible machinery lurked within. Pawing, spilling wine on her scrubs, Bee breathed in her face—Queenie recoiled, expecting months of barf-scrubbed larynx. Instead, the dog’s breath was as light and fresh as baby powder.
They sat out in the dark until Queenie fell asleep. When she woke, in the soaked and feverish dawn, Bee had left.
*
The TV whispered a paisley, washed-out glow. Like a submersible, the remote breached the blanket between Queenie’s legs. She switched to the news.
Cars squatted in gridlock on the crowded highway out to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal. A tiny figure wandering between them, an enormous substance unfurling behind it like a parachute. The chopper footage zoomed, revealing a dog trotting backward down the outbound lane—Bee, her jaws wide in an unblinking retch. A human tide abandoned their cars before her advance, glancing over their shoulders, keeping ahead of her brisk stride.
Queenie watched with growing nausea as the camera revealed a gritty trash-sown beach and the grey of the nearby sea, the water placid and dead. Where the cracked dividers ended, Bee turned over the curb, backing down the birdshot sand. The parachute started to spiral.
The dog reached the water’s edge. With the web assembling before her, Bee stopped, sides heaving. Queenie’s stomach flipped, dry throat gulping. A crowd had gathered on the edge of the road. Bee closed her jaws, severing the strands. The thing swayed in the breeze.
From the direction of the ferry, another dog strode purposefully along the beach, a Golden Retriever. Sniffing, it came up behind Bee’s shoulder. Queenie squinted at the television. The ropy nets of metal started settling, wrapping into a square. Loops and snarls piled atop a hazy foundation; walls and fences began to appear. A roof slowly formed, eaves sharpening. The people on the road seemed to clap and cheer.
The helicopter slowly panned out. Queenie watched, breathless, as the silver chimney took shape. Bee stared at the familiar house, the other dog against her shoulder. They mounted the steps, the steel door opening for them. Then the porch was empty. There was, Queenie supposed, even an attic.
Bile exploded up her throat. Ripping from the couch, she dashed to the bathroom, roughing her knees against the tile. With her fevered head hooked over the porcelain, retch after retch racked her body, spittle dripping from her hanging lips. She smiled.