Sarah Court by Craig Davidson

them. A
carbon atom in his eye or a vessel of her heart.”
    “That’s stupid. Don’t talk that way.”
    “It’s a loop. Continuous.”
    “And everything and everyone must be on this
blessed loop? What about . . . televangelists?”
    “Yes, pet.” His chuckle dissolved into a hacking
fit. “Even them.”
    It isn’t stupid. It’s the most unselfish theory of
the afterlife I know of: instead of your spirit floating
intact upon a cloud, you particalize into millions of
fresh lives.
    A jar of Blueberry Tapioca goes into my pocket.
Wax Beans and Vegetable. Fruit Medley. At home
I arrange them in a pyramid on the table. The
answering machine flashes.
    Lieutenant Mulligan from the NRP. It’s been
approved for you to view the baby. . . .
    I had a pet squirrel. I wanted to name him Alvin,
after the cartoon character. My father preferred
Ming Fa, after a fireworks guru from feudal China.
    Alvin entered our lives in the jaws of Excelsior,
Mama
Russell’s
sweet-tempered
sheepdog.
She
deposited the red, squealing, saliva-slick blob on our
lawn.
    At the house of our neighbour, Frank Saberhagen,
there once stood a pine tree. The tree failed to jibe
with Saberhagen’s post-divorce aesthetic: he’d ripped
out the sod, salted the earth, and carpeted his yard
with shaved white schist imported from Egypt. The
pine was plagued with bark weevils. Needles gone
brown. Only the doctor’s macabre taste kept it alive.
    A
brain
surgeon
who’d
assisted
on
the
groundbreaking
Labradum
Procedure
at
Johns
Hopkins, Saberhagen evidently found it cathartic to
set aside the scalpel in favour of the double-bitted
axe. A fluid tornado of a man with the tight-packed
frame of a circus acrobat, he’d stood shirtless, axe
in hand, boots gritting on the schist comprising his
front yard—a horticultural perversity rendering
him persona non grata in the neighbourhood—taking
crazed strokes at the tree. For all his deftness in the
operating theatre, Saberhagen was a bungler when it
came to lumberjacking. The axe blade ricocheted off
the trunk. Pine cones pelted his head.
    “Give ’er hell, Quincy!” called his neighbour,
Fletcher Burger. Saberhagen’s nickname was based
on the coroner played by Jack Klugman in the series
of the same name, the morbid suggestion being
Saberhagen was such a poor surgeon his professional
dossier included as many corpses as the fictional
coroner.
    Observing the flailings of his owner was Moxie:
a vile-tempered corgi Saberhagen had been forced to
accept during his divorce proceedings. Whereas in
many divorces custody of a pet is viciously quarrelled
over, the Saberhagens’ quarrel was over who would
be obliged to shuffle the dog off its mortal coil.
The ex-Mrs. Saberhagen—who at a block party was
heard stating that her then-hubby possessed “All the
personal charm of a deathwatch beetle,” and went
on to characterize him as “giving about as much
back to the world as a drainpipe”—was victorious.
The flatulent, oily-coated, grumpy old dog became
Frank’s tortuous burden.
    Moxie was deeply disagreeable. He constantly
escaped Saberhagen’s yard by digging under the
fence. Nobody would pet him on account of (a) the
corgi’s furious digging occasioned some breed of
canine skin disorder manifesting in a greasy hide
that stunk of rotting fruit and (b) Moxie snapped
at anyone who petted him, anyway, providing less
incentive to perform what was already a revolting
kindness. Cross-eyed and splenetic, Moxie pissed
on marigolds and harassed birds at their baths.
Saberhagen no longer responded when his pager
flashed: Neighbour called. Dog loose again.
    Saberhagen
eventually
delivered
the
pine’s
deathblow. The tree split up its trunk and toppled.
Moxie
was
splayed
on
the
porch
with
Nick,
Saberhagen’s son. Cross-eyed as he was, the corgi did
note the clutch of baby squirrels tipped from their
nest. He bounded off the porch to