Writing all the time in my head/ But tend not to do the transcription. – Barker Ajax

Close to closing time. Not drunk.

Alone at the bar in a fancy joint when someone sat on the stool next to me.

The bar itself was a rectangle in the middle of the room and I could see all the other seats – all empty.

Snuck a glance.

Face suggested Reed College, probably Twentieth Century American literature. Maybe Art History.

The rest of her looked like Jessica Rabbit, if the beautiful bunny had been brunette and less animated.

“Okay if I sit here?,” she asked quietly, as she alighted without waiting for my answer.

The phrase “A million things went through my mind” seems apt here, but – in truth – might have only been a dozen or so.

I don’t have a hundred dollars, was my first thought. What should I say? How do I act? What’s going on? What is she up to? Daddy issues, rebound or both? Is this a message from God? My lucky day? You should probably do something. Make a move, you’re a grown man, damn it.

That’s twelve right there.

Think we can agree, confused and sober is no way to go through life.

Before I could open my mouth, she says, “Today is my twenty-first birthday and I don’t want to spend tonight alone.”

Might have been the tiniest quiver of her upper lip, but steely determination in her dark eyes.

“Bartender’s handsome, but he’s gay” was my response. She laughed.

He wasn’t homosexual, but why take chances.

“Like what you see?”

Dressed in a shiny slinky black dress. she looked normal and extraordinary at the same time, like a model on a car show pedestal. Sporty with all the available options.

I might have actually gulped.

“Yes, Ma’m,” giving her my best young Sam Elliott.

“How ’bout you?,” I joked.

“Saw you through the window.”

Like she was shopping.

What kind of store? Hope not a butcher shoppe. ‘I’ll have some of yesterday’s stringy ham, please.’ Attracted by my looks? Still got it. Ha. I was sitting with my back to the street. She only saw my reflection distorted. In the mirror. Everybody always does that anyway.

“What do you do?” interrupts my reverie.

“I think a lot. I’m a philosopher.”

“Really? Have you written anything I might have read?”

“No,” I told her. “That’s part of my philosophy.”

Sad eyes, the color of a chocolate martini.

Managed to celebrate that birthday for six months.

Saw her some years later. She was all grown up and alone.

Reincarnation

Sometimes when I look at our dog Jack I think
he might be my Radical American History professor come back to make amends
—he gazes at me so sorrowfully.

What is it Jack, I say, why do you look like that? But Jack
doesn’t answer; he lies down and rests his head on his paws.

Black hair covered nearly all of that man’s body, thick
under his blue oxford shirt when I put my hand there.
Perhaps that accounted for the bow tie,
the pipe, the tweed cap.

This time I can teach him to sit and to stay.
Stay, I say to Jack, who looks at the treat in my hand
and then at me, and at the treat and then at me, and he stays.

Come, I say to Jack, but Jack does not always come.
Sometimes he sits and looks at me a long time
as when my professor would lean back in his chair
draw on his pipe and gaze at me.

But when I hold a treat Jack comes, and I remember how
the professor would lick dripping honey from the jar
lick peanut butter from the knife.

A little stubborn, our dog Jack,
shy, we thought
until the morning my daughter jumped on my bed
and Jack sprang at her growling.

And the next morning, when he rushed toward her growling
and bit her skirt and tore it, and bit her and broke her skin,
and when I went to collar him, bit me, snarling, and bit and bit.

That’s when I was pretty sure he was my history professor.

The vet said this happens more often than you’d imagine.
He must always be tethered, she said, until he can be trusted.
He must learn that you and your daughter come first.
And no more couch, and no more sleeping in the bed with you, Mama,
not ever.

I finally left him so late at night it was nearly dawn—
picking up my boots by the door,
stepping down the two flights, then running toward the car.

What can I say? Jack may be my American History professor come back,
after all these years, to make amends,

or Jack may be actually himself – a dog.

By Marie Howe