The dog was behind the dumpster, lying in the strip of shade between the bin and the building’s back wall.
Jess almost didn’t see it.
She was taking out the trash the way she always took out the trash, which was carrying the bag at arm’s length and not looking at anything because the alley behind her building smelled like old grease and wet cardboard and looking around only made it worse.
But the bag caught on the dumpster lid and she had to stop and yank it free, and when she looked down there it was.
Medium-sized, brownish, some kind of mutt with a wide chest and ears that went up halfway and then folded over like they’d lost interest. No collar. It was lying on its side with its head up, watching her.
Not scared, not hopeful. Just watching.
“Oh,” Jess said.
The dog’s tail moved. Half a wag, noncommittal, like it was acknowledging her but not making any promises.
She threw the trash bag into the dumpster and stood there. The dog stood up. It was thinner than it should have been, she could tell that much, but it moved okay. It shook itself off the way dogs do after they’ve been lying down for a while, a full-body shake that started at the head and rippled all the way back.
Then it looked at her again.
Jess went inside and came back with a bowl of water and some leftover rice from two nights ago. She set them down on the concrete about four feet from the dog and stepped back.
The dog walked over and drank the water first, long and steady, and then ate the rice. All of it.
When it finished it sat down next to the empty bowl and looked at her, and she looked at it, and that was apparently enough of a conversation for both of them because she said “Okay” and held the door open and the dog walked into her apartment.
It sniffed around for about ten minutes. The kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom doorway. It moved in those zigzag patterns, nose to the floor, following whatever invisible routes existed down there.
Then it walked to the corner of the living room where the couch met the wall and lay down on the carpet. Curled up tight, nose tucked under its tail, and closed its eyes.
Jess sat on the couch with her laptop open on a spreadsheet she was supposed to be updating and watched the dog sleep. She worked from home doing data entry for a medical billing company, which required just enough attention that she couldn’t do something else but not enough to keep her from staring out the window between entries.
The apartment at two in the afternoon looked the same as it did at two in the morning. Same mug on the counter from yesterday, same light coming through the same window hitting the same spot on the carpet where it always hit. The spreadsheet cursor blinked at her and she blinked back.
The dog slept for three hours.
—-
She went to the dollar store the next morning before the dog was awake.
She’d never bought anything for a dog before and she stood in the pet aisle, which was really just half an aisle shared with cleaning supplies, looking at her options.
There was a bag of dry food, the cheap kind with a cartoon dog on the front that looked nothing like any dog that had ever existed. A pack of tennis balls. And a collar.
The collar was red nylon with a plastic buckle, the kind of thing that would probably last about six months before the stitching came apart. It cost a dollar fifty. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands and put it in her basket along with the food and the tennis balls and a bag of those bone-shaped treats that she wasn’t sure any dog actually liked but felt like the right thing to buy.
The dog was awake when she got back, sitting by the front door like it had been waiting. Its tail did that half-wag thing when she walked in.
She poured some of the food into the bowl she’d been using, the smell of it dry and mealy and vaguely like sawdust, and the dog ate it, and while it ate she knelt down next to it and held up the collar.
It was a small thing. Just a strip of red nylon with a cheap buckle. But putting it on felt like something.
She slipped it around the dog’s neck, the nylon stiff and smooth against her fingers, and she could feel the warmth of the dog’s fur underneath as she adjusted the fit, two fingers between the collar and the skin the way she’d seen someone do in a video once.
The plastic buckle clicked when she pulled the end through and pressed it flat. The dog didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away. It just kept eating, the red collar sitting there against its brown fur, bright and new and completely out of place.
“Biscuit,” she said.
The dog looked up from the bowl. Rice stuck to its chin.
“Your name is Biscuit.”
The dog went back to eating.
She took Biscuit for a walk that afternoon. She put on actual shoes and actual pants, not the shorts she’d been wearing for three days straight, and clipped the leash she’d forgotten to buy to the collar’s metal ring using a carabiner from her junk drawer.
They walked around the block. Biscuit sniffed everything. Every mailbox post, every patch of grass, every crack in the sidewalk. Jess let the dog lead and by the time they got back she realized it was the first time she’d been outside for more than five minutes in over a week.
She started walking Biscuit every morning. It gave the day a shape it hadn’t had before. She’d wake up and the dog would be in its corner, and it would lift its head when she came out of the bedroom, and she’d say “Morning, Biscuit” and put on shoes and they’d go.
Around the block, then two blocks, then down to the little park with the pond that was more of a puddle. For that half hour the world had a pace to it. Somewhere to be and someone to be there with, even if the someone was a stray she’d found behind a dumpster.
She noticed things about Biscuit. The dog lay down a lot. Not just sleeping at night, but during the day, middle of the afternoon, middle of a walk sometimes. They’d be moving along and Biscuit would just stop and lie down on the sidewalk and Jess would stand there holding the leash waiting for the dog to get back up.
“You’re a lazy one, huh?” she said the first time it happened.
It kept happening. Bursts of energy, nose working, and then the dog would slow down and find a spot and lie flat. Jess figured it was adjusting. The dog had been outside for who knows how long, sleeping on concrete, and now it had carpet and regular meals. Of course it was tired. It was finally somewhere it could rest.
On the third day she threw one of the tennis balls across the living room. It bounced off the far wall and rolled across the carpet and Biscuit watched it go. Just watched it. Head tracking the ball from her hand to the wall to the floor, eyes following it as it rolled to a stop near the bedroom door. Then Biscuit looked at her.
“Go get it,” Jess said.
Biscuit put its head down on its paws.
She threw it again later. Same thing. The dog watched the ball roll and then looked at her like she was the one who didn’t understand how this worked. She laughed, shrugged, and picked up the ball herself.
—-
On the fourth day she took Biscuit to the vet. The one on Franklin, the small clinic with the hand-painted sign and the bell on the door that jangled when you walked in. She hadn’t made an appointment. She just showed up and told the woman at the desk she’d found a dog and wanted to make sure it was healthy.
The waiting room had plastic chairs and a corkboard on the wall covered in business cards and flyers and photos of pets with handwritten thank-you notes from their owners. Jess sat down with Biscuit at her feet and looked at the corkboard while she waited.
There was a flyer near the bottom, half-covered by a card for a mobile groomer. Missing dog. The photo was bad. Taken from a distance, slightly blurry, the kind of picture someone takes with their phone when they don’t have a better one.
It showed a brownish dog standing in what looked like a yard, face turned partly away from the camera. The description underneath said medium-sized, brown, mixed breed. Last seen near the east end of town. Contact number at the bottom with tabs torn off. Two of them were gone.
Jess looked at the flyer. She looked down at Biscuit, who was lying on the clinic floor with its chin on her shoe. She looked back at the flyer.
The dog in the photo could have been any brown dog. The picture was too blurry to make out the ears or the chest or anything specific. It probably was a completely different animal. There had to be a hundred brown mutts in this part of the state.
She looked away from the corkboard.
When they called her name she picked up the leash and walked Biscuit into the exam room and the vet, a woman in her fifties with short gray hair and reading glasses on a chain around her neck, did the things vets do.
Listened to the heart. Felt along the belly. Looked at the teeth, the ears, the eyes. She asked how long Jess had had the dog and Jess said a few days, that she’d found it outside her building.
“Seems healthy,” the vet said. “A little thin, could use some weight. No microchip, I checked. If anything changes, loss of appetite, lethargy, anything unusual, bring it back in.”
Jess nodded. She paid the thirty-five dollars at the front desk and walked past the corkboard without looking at it and took Biscuit home.
That night she sat on the couch with Biscuit lying in the corner and thought about the flyer. How she hadn’t pulled off one of the tabs. How she’d looked at the photo and decided it wasn’t a match even though she couldn’t really tell. The decision had happened fast, almost before she’d finished looking, like she’d already made up her mind before she walked into the clinic.
On the fifth morning she put on her shoes and clipped the carabiner to Biscuit’s collar and they walked to the park. Biscuit sniffed along the path the way it always did, and then it stopped and lay down on the sidewalk. Jess stood there holding the leash. The dog lay there for a long time, longer than usual, breathing slow and steady, and Jess crouched down and scratched behind its ears.
“Come on, Biscuit. Let’s go home.”
The dog got up eventually. They walked back.
She worked all morning. Around noon she threw the tennis ball one more time just to see. The dog watched it bounce off the wall and roll under the coffee table and didn’t move.
“You’re never going to chase that thing, are you?”
Biscuit yawned.
She closed her laptop at five without remembering what she’d done since lunch and went to the kitchen to start thinking about dinner and that’s when she noticed the window.
The living room window, the one she kept cracked an inch because the building’s heat was unreliable and sometimes the apartment got stuffy. The screen was pushed out. Not torn, not broken. Pushed.
Bent outward at the bottom where something had pressed against it from inside, hard enough to pop it free from the frame. It hung at an angle, still attached at the top, swinging slightly in the breeze coming through.
Biscuit was gone.
Jess stood at the window and looked out. The fire escape was right there, and from the fire escape it was a short drop to the alley below. The same alley where she’d found the dog five days ago.
She went outside. Walked the block calling a name the dog didn’t know was its name, because five days isn’t enough for a name to stick. She walked to the park. Past the vet clinic, closed now, the corkboard invisible behind the dark glass. She walked until it got dark and then she walked home.
The apartment was quiet. The bowl was still on the kitchen floor with a few pieces of kibble in it. The tennis ball was still under the coffee table. The corner where Biscuit slept still had an impression in the carpet, a shallow dip where something warm had been lying.
She picked up the bowl. Washed it. Put it in the cabinet above the sink. She picked up the tennis ball and held it for a second and then put it in the junk drawer with the carabiner. She swept the kitchen even though it didn’t need it.
Then she went to the living room window. The screen was still hanging there, bent and useless. She pulled it the rest of the way off and set it against the wall. She looked at the window, the inch of open air at the bottom where the evening was coming in, cool and quiet and smelling like concrete and the faint green of the one tree on her street.
She left it cracked.
She left it cracked and went to bed and lay there in the dark listening to the nothing that came through it. The nothing sounded the same as before except now she knew what it was missing. A dog breathing in the other room. The click of nails on the kitchen floor at two in the morning.
Five days. A red collar and a name and a morning routine and it was gone. Out the window, down the fire escape, back to wherever it was going, wearing the cheap dollar-store collar she’d buckled around its neck like that meant something. Like that made it hers.
The window stayed cracked. Just in case.