I knew it was time to leave Florida when the sinkhole ate Buddy. I was sitting in a kiddie pool with the hose running, throwing a mangled tennis ball for him to retrieve, when the earth rumbled. Buddy looked around like he felt something coming. If he knew what the rumble meant, he’d have moved the five feet it would have taken to keep him up here on the surface. As the neighbor’s yard opened below him, Buddy gave no yip or yelp. Just wide dog eyes and he was gone.
I tried to imagine he was fine down there. A colony of dogs and people who’d been eaten up by the earth, playing cards and making fires. Some kind soul throwing Buddy a stick. I don’t know how it works. Wormholes, maybe. Maybe a trailer fell down there or a radio. Maybe they build things and pull off a social order. A new new world.
This was why I had to leave. The life I imagined for Buddy down there was so much better than anything going on for me up here. I was six months behind on rent. I’d been staying in a bedroom that this older couple, Barry and Mary, had put on Craigslist. Cheap but not cheap enough. I’d been bartending, but the owners started reducing my shifts. Giving me Tuesday afternoons.
So, I got into the Civic and started driving. I rushed through Tallahassee and Tuscaloosa and Memphis, performing the romanticized drinking thing and sleeping in my car. I hooked up with some older women and ran out of their condos in the night. Yipping small dogs. Running down the sidewalk in the dark, my mind glowed with a vision of a meaningful destination. A golden town where I’d settle down and get a new dog and name him Buddy Two. A deck and a view of farmland. Or rolling hills. Or a mountain. The details kept changing, but I’d know the place when I found it. I’d hear a chime. I’d feel a charge.
Campgrounds were the best places to crash. I got sunburnt and peeled and burnt again, lying on dead grass. Barry and Mary called to see if I was okay. I told them I was visiting family. I told them I was feeling at home with a community of people who cared. They didn’t ask about Buddy, so I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t know how to tell them about the sinkhole. I hoped they’d put two and two together. Before Buddy was my dog, he was theirs. They just didn’t love him as much.
Up in Spokane, I glommed on to a friend group of recent college graduates. They were full of fear of the dismal economy and nostalgia for skipping classes to hit bongs. A persistent angst going on. I picked up cigarettes for the first time since I’d quit. I stopped using condoms. I stopped eating except for dinners. The kids showed me this guy on YouTube who had a whole system for hacking health — fasting, cold showers, bodyweight exercises. We went around proselytizing the regimen to strangers at bars, at the park.
We dropped acid in an abandoned hospital one afternoon, which was when I saw Buddy again. I chased him down the halls and into a plaid room, walls and ceiling. He told me things were not so good down in the substrata colony. Things were not so good anywhere, he said, and they were getting worse. I tried warning the kids, but they only laughed. I called Barry and Mary and spilled the story about Buddy, bawling, but they said Buddy was fine. He was right with them, barking at a squirrel, wanting to chase the thing down. They told me I could come back any time, that they didn’t care about the rent I owed. We could reset the bill.
Driving back out through Idaho, I felt the hope in my heart welling massive. Every tension and ambition at once. The glowing home of my future churned in my stomach until it grew wild and rancid. I hit the gas, but it was too late. The glow had turned liquid and thick, green and yellow, spreading fast up my legs. Around my gut. I swatted it away, but the glow oozed up my neck and jaw. It gripped my neck and flowed into my mouth, nose, ears. Clapped ringing. I lost control of the car and wrapped it around a telephone pole near the Montana border. I was lucky. A plumber drove by and pulled me out of the car before it caught fire. He took me to the hospital, but then had to run to an appointment. I was out cold, so I never saw him. The nurse told me he left his number, curious to know how well I recovered. She could call if she wanted, I said. I wouldn’t know where to start.
Ryan Shea’s writing can be found in ergot., hex, Rejection Letters, and other journals. He lives in western Massachusetts.