vestigial

Iris is a good dog. 

When I was twenty, I paid some dude in a van ten bucks to adopt her. I wasn’t willing to ask questions about her background—the guy had an accidental puppy he was willing to practically give away and she had big, watery brown eyes and needed a home. Despite her bastard status, I’d do anything for Iris. If someone even deigned to put a bruise on her peach-skin nose, I’d commit heinous crimes in her name or fight to the death, though she wouldn’t appreciate it much in her mellowed senior years. It’s the real test of devotion, you know?

Iris is mostly spare parts—four chopstick legs protruding beneath a stout brindle body, cow-splattered in white, claiming six toes per foot, and fixed with ears on either hemisphere of her head that look like fried pork rinds. She’s nearly bald on her belly, the pink skin only dusted with a soft white down, perfect for scratches. I like to press my nose where her fur crops up in thick handfuls, warming my face against the back of her neck, breathing in her animal smell and listening to her heart pump, reminding both of us she’s here and that I’ll never let a single bad thing ever happen to her again.

My favorite part about her is her sausage-stump tail. It wags, barely visible behind her plump rear end. Van-guy wasn’t sure what happened. Iris is far from a specific breed (let alone one with a standard like tail-docking), but in the short time she changed hands over and over on her way to me, someone cut the tail off at the second vertebrae. 

If I thought about it too much, I’d boil over with anger. Still, I found myself laying nose-to-nose with her in our bed, imagining the person who decided to chop it off as if I could confront them and really see how they would feel if they woke up one day and found themselves short a limb. I’d make them sorry.

I get mad too much. I don’t think about other people quite enough.

Dogs don’t tend to care about personality flaws like that unless you direct it at them, and I could never find fault in Iris, even when she was little, peeing on my carpet or snuffling through my garbage. She flinched the first time I touched her head, so we struck a promise—she would never have to worry if she was safe with me. From the moment I brought her home, it was us against the world, alone together and happy about it. Iris had full run of my space, but she learned the best spot was velcro-ed right between my bicep and armpit, her stump bobbing every time I stroked across her back, down to the base of her spine.

“I used to have one too,” I said. “Before I was born.”

I shifted in my seat, visualizing the pyramidal slice of bone at the base of every human’s spine. Coccyx. A piece of our animal pasts, forgotten, only coming into focus in caveman specials on the History Channel or when I fall too hard in kickboxing—like that time my opponent knocked the wind out of me with a chest kick.

One moment I was up, the next I was flat on my ass, pain running up and down my spine from my tailbone. Blood dribbled on the mat as I seethed; my teeth had sliced into my lower lip. I couldn’t get angry. Besides rage being the reason I got into fighting, anger would only make my moves sloppier. Instead, I limped out of the gym and tended to my own wounds—a mottled lower back and a too-fragile ego.

“Jesus,” Mom said when I pulled my shorts down the next day, showing off the purple and green skin. My coccyx smarted when she brushed it with her cool fingers and hissed, “They really should be more gentle.”

“Not the point,” I said. She didn’t get it and didn’t like it—how I relished in the bruises, how I needed the pain—but I was finally holding down a job, making new friends, and coming out of my room instead of convecting in my own bitter air. Whatever emotions were leftover could be dealt with on the mats.

“I’m going back tomorrow,” I announced, pulling my clothes back over my skin, hiding the bruise as if it would make the pain any easier.

Truth was, though, that fall made me hate fighting for the remainder of the year. I’d bow out of sparring rounds I used to rush into and pick hitting pads over dogpen—my coach’s fun game of everyone gets in a circle and beats on one lucky contestant—which I usually lived for, since it was the only way I could let my anger shred through me. In one swift move, it reminded me how much rage was still left in my body, how I couldn’t completely get rid of it, even though I tried.

As a small, white, and visually typical woman, I carry privilege. But even though I could get away with some fits, I flew past the point of harmless-yet-annoying and into mad-dog most days—teeth gnashing, screaming, up-in-your-face. 

Mornings spent picking up pieces after the previous night’s rage bled into days I had to keep to myself. With enough apologies in my repertoire, they stopped meaning anything. Anger is chemical, baser than any other emotion. It stuck to me like a drug that never wanted to leave my system. Instead, its remnants circulated on and on.

One time in college, a very kind, very well meaning acquaintance sat me down one day to have the “one day, you might get angry at the wrong person” talk. (She thought I’d get myself killed in a road-rage incident, which—if those videos we had to watch in driver’s ed were accurate—surely happened all the time.)

Though I appreciated her concern, the truth was clear: every person I got angry at was the wrong person. No one deserves to be yelled at or demeaned. And I knew this. By the time I was out of college and living on my own, any potential friendship or date gave me the exact same reason to slink away. I knew if they caught me at the wrong moment, I’d crash the metaphorical van, stomp out on the road, and regret all my actions afterwards.

Even though I tried to deal with the anger through therapy and fighting sports, it survived. I was alone for most of my early twenties. Iris was my best and only friend. 

She had anger issues, too. It wasn’t evident until she was old enough to start going on hikes with me, but she absolutely loathed seeing any other dog on a leash when we were outside. She worked herself up to the point of screaming through her open throat as she bore her teeth, even if it was just a nice old man and his chihuahua out for a stroll.

It embarrassed me. I scrolled through countless Instagram dog trainers promising that “this one weird tip will cure your dog’s reactivity for sure!” and tried every kind of collar, leash, harness, or muzzle I could get my hands on at the pet store. All it did was drain my bank account and frustrate both me and Iris and still, our walks were pure struggle—me, pulling her chomping face away and apologizing to the other walkers and her, frustrated that I wouldn’t let her do what her instincts were begging her to do.

We were on an intense trail in the Birmingham backwoods—a space where the small city spread out into greens and browns, early fall air coming through the lines of boulders and coaxing red and orange out of the deciduous trees. I knew most of the paths by heart, their color-coded blazes etching towards the summit, then drifting back down, a simple out-and-back. 

I loved hard hikes like I learned to love kickboxing. They were a way to empty myself of any other thought, pulling my focus firmly towards the work itself. It left an ache down to my bones on good days—the kind that felt primal, real. Struggle was a gift.

Salt seeped into my lips. Iris trailed ahead of me, pulling me forward up the long hill, the littlest pants leaving her mouth, pink tongue darting beyond wet black nose.

I always had my head on a swivel out in the woods, pepper spray nestled in my pack’s hip pocket. Most of the time, shouting, “Not friendly!” while my dog mouth-foamed at passing hikers was enough to shelter the two of us from any obnoxious trail-mates. Nobody wants to small talk with a hellhound gnashing at their heels.

We turned a bend when a fat, yellow lab ambled up out of nowhere—off leash, tail windshield-wipering over the detritus. Iris raised her hackles and growled, snout quivering. My heart lurched. A dog alone in the woods. Was he abandoned? Did someone hurt him?

No, there was a figure crunching through the oaks, yards behind the dog. A man, tall and greying, holding a water bottle, bright orange slip-lead looped over his neck.

My instinct kicked in as I projected my voice, “She’s reactive!” I paused to suck more air in. Iris yanked ahead of me and cried through her teeth. “She’s not friendly!” I yelled.

But the guy didn’t call his dog back, even though it cowered, looping around a tree and peeking its wide brown eyes out at us. He came closer and closer, hand held out, his palm bigger than my face. 

I reeled Iris closer to me, her leash making the flesh on my own hand bulge from pressure, and tried again, “Seriously man, she bites!”

“Dogs act like that when they’re in the woods,” he said. “They just need to meet each other.”

His dog vibrated, still behind the tree. Surroundings drifted. I scanned behind me, then cut my eyes back up the hill. It was mid-morning, the beginning of a beautiful day, but hardly anyone was out on the trail. I had wanted it that way, to get away from the noise and the obligation to smile, to act nice. Iris groaned as I held her steady and fought the urge to back away through the woods. This guy was playing with danger, but maybe I was, too. 

“I’m Brent,” he said. Closer and closer. Heat roiled in my stomach. “I love meeting people out here.”

“Seriously?”

He extended his hand out, first in a handshake, and then cast it down to Iris when he realized I wasn’t giving in. And that did it. She lunged and snapped her teeth at him, just barely missing his skin, teeth gritting with a sharp thwack when her jaw shut.

“Jesus!” he shouted. “Train your dog.” One tongue click is all it took to get his lab back in front of him, leash around his thick neck. But he was still staring at me. Fixing Iris and me with his eyes, disgusted. By us. By the fact we couldn’t be friendly.

  I breathed in. I let it flow.

“You know what, buddy?” I started. “Fuck you! I told you to get away from my dog.” He backed away, but I kept pushing forward. Iris barked, still worked up over the lab or just happy I was joining in. “Get out of here. We don’t want to meet you!”

“You’re psycho,” he said, cutting a wide angle off the trail, eyes still on us, dragging his dog beside him. The poor thing tried to keep up as he broke into a jog.

Watching his back retreat, I screamed one last time, my voice breaking: “I hate you!”

And then he was gone. No sound leftover. I had scared all the animals away, surely.

Shame punched me in the chest. I had just screamed and spat at a stranger in the woods like some kind of creature. I was supposed to be relaxing, getting some fresh air. I was supposed to stop letting my emotions get the better of me. I didn’t want to keep hiking—the summit wasn’t worth sitting in the embarrassment and residual anger, like a mix between a fat pour of whiskey and the regret that comes when the five am alarm goes off.

I looked down at Iris. All rage had filtered out of her, her brown eyes were wide, watching me, waiting for what comes next. She held herself with the dignity of a senator’s wife, her stump tail bobbing in the air. To her, the danger was gone. A job well done.

The leash pulled taut. Iris was ready.

—

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