Today is Thursday. I am going to pick up the dog. I had left him there for a few days. Maybe four. Maybe five.
Along the way, the houses looked alike. Every antenna on the roofs leaned a little. Each door was slightly crooked. A yellow light flickered in the shop window. The dog seemed to recognize the place.
Down the corridor were dogs, cages strung like a spine through them. The dogs looked the same, like the houses. One low-eared, dirty dog pawed at the dirt with his front legs, then snapped his head and hurled himself against the locked cage. I wondered why they had left him there. A funeral. Or maybe for a celebration. But it felt more like abandonment.
I remember the day the dog came home. His excitement that first day. My mother is holding him, his puffed fur, his oversized paws.
“How cute,” she says.
She presses him to the left side of her chest like a prize.
She is wearing a pale yellow, semi-transparent dress.
A yellow dress can disappear easily.
I search for my mother among the hangers, their heads tilted.
My mother used to recognize clothes immediately.
I don’t know in which season a dress like this is worn.
I am wearing a funeral-pink tulle dress.
I touch the fabric.
Dresses: satin, silk, duck green.
“Ruffles are never allowed.”
At first there were no dresses, only my mother and me. Now they strain the wardrobe doors, hang from the handles, collapse onto a chair. My mother’s death is not a secret, but it hides in drawers, catches on the tip of a hanger.
I gather the dresses that have fallen from their hooks. I hang the silver skirts beside the sailor-collared movie-star blouses.
Nothing tells me where it belongs.
But it is there,
inside the wardrobe,
wedged among the others.
Overfilled drawers. Overturned chairs. Pillows that have lost their place. One day I plan to put everything in order.
Not today.
Today is Thursday. I am going to pick up the dog.
But I can’t find my bag.
At first there were no bags or shoes either—only my mother, the books she read from time to time, her checkered shirt, and my waiting for her to wake late in the summer mornings. Other mothers had tangerine-colored tea sets. They smelled of soap and powder. My mother, one May of my childhood, chose a satin dress, let her hair down, set her shirt aside.
But satin always slips.
It slides off your shoulder.
I think about the road where I left the dog—the hay bales, the identical houses. I reach for the lock. The heavy bolt opens. He appears. I knock. The door opens. I step inside. He runs.
Time sits at the threshold like a dog.
I think of my mother.
Of going to her with the dog.
She is wearing an old dress.
She has been waiting for us for a long time.
Today, for the first time,
the dresses lined up.
For the first time,
the door truly opened.
I went in.
I found the dog in an old park.
He was sitting on a stone.
He was leashed, but not tied.
He ran.
He did not hesitate.
The dog knew.
He had seen the ceiling,
and the mother coming down,
like a dress, on a rope.
And he pawed—
the soil,
the scent,
the time.
We walked together.
At every intersection,
he chose the direction before me.
Time stopped beneath his paws.
My beautiful mother,
there,
just beyond the threshold,
never aged,
her face never changed.
Today is Thursday.
Every Thursday, I tried.
Sometimes I packed my bag.
Sometimes I put on my shoes.
And yet I never went to pick up the dog.
Cansu Açıkgöz is a writer and editor based in Ankara, Turkey. Her fiction traces memory and forgetting through ordinary spaces and small, persistent details. She writes in Turkish and translates her work into English herself.
Image: sebastiansantanam8qnfs, morguefile.com
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