Last Days of the Dog-Men by Brad Watson

and startling, their bodies drawn into it like a child’s arm drawn briefly into a hard and painful little muscle.
    Agnes slowed her steps as her heart sped up. She remembered kissing Pops in the late years and how it was just pinched-up lips and a dry peck, and remembered kissing him like that in his box, how his lips were like wood and how horrified she’d been. She’d had that craving for a child, briefly, a little bit late, and had not pressed it with Pops. He’d not had word one on the subject. He seemed at times such a passive man, and then at others all pent up. If he’d had passions, she suspected he disapproved of their expression. Perhaps he told them to Bob in the intimacy between a man and his dog, who knows what a man told his dog? He’d always had Bob. There were two other dogs before him, but they were the same kind of dog, looked exactly the same. Every one named Bob. She wondered if he’d have done the same with her if she’d died, just gone out and got another Agnes. If there hadn’t been Bob, maybe he’d have talked to her.Seemed like they had the same dog for forty-nine years. One would die, Pops would get another one just like it the next day. Seemed to have the same obnoxious personality. She’d sometimes catch herself looking at that dog, or one of them, and thinking, This is the longest-living dog I ever saw. She laughed out loud.
    She rounded a comer and looked down a narrow street lighted dimly by the old streetlamps. Far down, a little dog stood still in the middle of the road. From what Agnes could make out, it looked like Bob. He seemed to be looking back at her.
    She leaned forward, squinting her good eye.
    The dog stood very still, looking at her.
    â€œBob,” Agnes said. Then she called out, “Bob! Come here, boy! Oh Bob!”
    She moved a little closer. Bob tensed up, stiffened his legs and his neck. Otherwise, he didn’t budge.
    Agnes clucked to herself and tapped the nightstick into her palm. “Damn old dog. I ought to let him run off somewhere.
    â€œGo on!” she called to him then. “Go on, if you want to.”
    Bob took a little straightening step. He lifted his head and sniffed the breeze. He was poised there, under the streetlamp, looking proud and aloof, seeming in that foggy distance like the ghost of all the Bobs. She imagined that after fifty years he was asking himself if he wanted any more. Well, she thought, she wouldn’t press it: she would let him go where he wanted to go.
    She heard a car and looked around. There at the stop sign sat Lura’s Impala, like some big pale fish paused on the ocean floor, the headlights its soft glowing eyes seeking. It nosed around the comer headed her way. At that Bob turned and trotted away. She watched him fade into the foggy gloom, just the hint of a sidling slip in his gait. Go on and look around then, she said to herself. Go see what you’ve been sniffing in the breeze. She couldn’t see him then, his image snuffed in the fog.
    She stood in the middle of the old quiet street and waited on Lura to pull up. On a lark she turned sideways and stuck out her thumb. The car eased up beside her. She opened the creaky old door and looked in. Lura appeared to be dressed for traveling.
    â€œI got an idea,” Agnes said.
    At Lura’s pace they reached the coast about dawn. They took the long winding road out to the fort, hung a left at the guardhouse, and went down to the beach. Lura, woozy with fatigue, rolled on off the blacktop and into the sand for several yards before the Impala bogged down. She took the gearshift in one white-gloved hand and pushed it up into Park, pushed the headlights knob to the dash, and shut off the engine. Gulls and wader birds called across the marsh. The sky was lightening into blue. Frogs and more birds began to call, and redwings clung to stalks of swaying sea oats.
    â€œListen to the morning,” Lura said.
    And Agnes