Why Dogs Chase Cars by George Singleton

I’m figuring some little fishes ate yours up, and then larger fish ate those things, and then those fish got caught by fishermen and sold to the public. If you think about it, I’m thinking that every person on this planet has been eating a little of you all along the way. What do you think about that?”
    He smiled in the same way that most fathers smile as their sons open up a wrapped bicycle or go-cart. I said, “Maybe I just sank to the bottom.”
    â€œNo. No, I saw sharks come up and swarm the wholething. It was still all blobby and red—I’d sealed it up tightly before burying it the first time, so dogs wouldn’t get to you. Anyway, you were on the deck, but you were little. And looking off at a school of jellyfish on the port side.” My dad and I were standing in front of the console TV, a commercial went off, and the
Hee Haw
theme song started. I could feel my eyes squinting in disbelief, my head cocking to the left. “I’m sorry you had to learn about all of this so early,” my father said. “Hey, sit down next to me and let me tell you how I used to play baseball for the Yankees in the summer, football for the Packers each winter, and the Olympics every four years before you came around.”
    I said how I needed to take something to show-and-tell the next day. My father held up his palm and said he had a variety of things for me to take, all of which would surprise and delight my teacher and classmates.
    W HEN S HIRLEY E BO tiptoed, I did, too. We crept out of a copse of tulip poplars. Her daddy’s three-room shack poked out of the clearing, and in the distance we saw Mr. Ebo with his back to us, gazing at his tomatoes and okra. Even I knew not to speak in a normal voice. I said quietly, “This is no cemetery, Shirley Ebo.”
    We slunk thirty steps south, always facing her father, then returned to the woods. We walked through unkempt honeysuckle and briars over a football field’s length, then turned toward a circular clearing no bigger than a flying saucer.There were a dozen sandstone rocks the size of Sunbeam bread packages propped up haphazardly, spread apart from each other in a uniform manner.
    Then off to the side stood a jug, and even from where I stood I recognized on it the buttons that had once clasped my mother’s dress front. Shirley said, “They it is,” and pointed.
    â€œCan I walk across here?” I asked. I looked straight up at the darkening sky, through the hole formed by missing trees. “I don’t like walking on people’s burial spots, man.” Shirley led me around the outer edge of the graves toward the jug.
    More than buttons covered this earthen, gallon-sized vessel, too: paper clips, a metal fingernail file, pieces of thread, hair, two barrettes, a couple of false eyelashes, a shoehorn, what appeared to be tiny glints of diamond, the cap to an aspirin bottle, and a compass had been glued on it. Shirley Ebo said, “My daddy said it just showed up one day. He said I could look at it all I wanted, but not to disturb it. He calls it a memory jug some days, and a whatnot jar others. My daddy says a long time ago sometimes these worked the same as headstones for the dead.”
    I didn’t touch the jar. On my hands and knees I looked into the mouth, hoping not to find ashes—or another photograph of me, standing at attention beside my mother’s sharp hips. I said, “My mother’s not buried here, Shirley. Take it back. I know for a fact that my mother’s not buried here. She used to call me up. My mother used to call me upfrom Nashville, and New Orleans. She called from St. Louis one time, and another time from Las Vegas.” I turned my head and squinted one eye, but the day’s sunlight in these woods had disappeared already.
    Shirley stood up. “I took a flashlight one time and looked in there, but there ain’t nothing. Don’t worry. It’s