Greyhound

They were back there grafting skin to Jane’s Greyhound’s leg.

On a jog with Jane, his leg had slipped through a sewer grate. He’d tried to run but was stuck. As he struggled, he’d scraped his leg, skin slipping down it like an old sock.

After waking from anesthesia, her Greyhound refused to move his legs. He held them straight out, rigid, on the surgical table.

The vet was a short man whose lab coat fit like a vestment.

“We see this a lot in retired Greyhounds,” the vet said to Jane in the waiting room. “It’s the mind-body problem.”

“Isn’t it called something else now? Wasn’t our conception of this wrong?” Jane asked, having just read a book that disproved previous books on the subject.

“For Greyhounds it’s still the mind-body problem.”

The vet administered anesthesia again, this time to make him remember to move his legs.

When he awoke the second time, he did start moving his legs, but it was not like he had gone back to normal. He was uncertain, wobbly.

A vet tech walked them to Jane’s car. When she opened her car door, her Greyhound barked at the interior, in the direction of the headrests. The vet tech said he knew of dog training techniques that would return him to his confident dog-like state, and would she like to eat lunch with him tomorrow?

“But will it work on a Greyhound?”

*

Soon after she was pregnant.

“You have inside you an intrauterine device,” said her gynecologist, an elderly man with wet lips.

She thought about this for a moment. Yes, she remembered the procedure, the pain, the blood. He’d scraped her getting it in… She had not thought much of the device since it was put inside her.

She was told her uterus had caused the IUD to drift over to one side, likely plugging only one fallopian tube. Her previous doctor, this doctor said, should have noticed her uterus when they put it in.

“My uterus?”

“You have a horned uterus. Yeah?”

She thought of a goat, its long narrow head like her Greyhound’s. They’d just been invited to a reunion at his old track. Of course she couldn’t let him race. Since the accident he had stayed on the couch, licking gauze off his leg.

“I’ve never seen this before in all my years. We never ever give IUDs to women with horned uteruses.” With a sigh he clicked off the monitor. They watched the image of her uterus fade to black. “But I think your baby will be completely fine.”

*

The vet tech pinned down the Greyhound, to discipline him. The Greyhound bit off the tip of the vet tech’s nose.

“I recognize the Greyhound teeth pattern,” the ENT doctor said. “With so many of the tracks closing in Florida, everyone seems to be adopting a Greyhound. And the tax incentives. Aren’t there tax incentives? But the transition jars them. You’re not the first bite. Not the first nose.”

After surgery Jane drove the vet tech home to the apartment they shared and tucked him in bed. 

“Euth…” the vet tech said. 

“‘Youth?’” Jane asked.

“Start again. With a new breed.”

Jane and her Greyhound left in the night, left the vet tech for good, left for the Greyhound reunion in Daytona Beach.

*

The owners stood against the chain link fence, waiting to watch the retired Greyhounds released from the starting box.

“You’re so right not to let your Greyhound race,” said a woman with a thinning bob and two blue brindles.

Jane recognized the woman from the pre-race tour of the facilities. The woman had pushed her blue brindles up to the kennel of an active racer, also a blue brindle. Whatever this woman had been expecting to happen had not happened.

“For us it’s about perspective,” the woman said. “I’m against my Greyhounds racing, but I want her to see what she had, where she came from. I tell her, ‘You lived in a crate under another crate. You were peed and pooped on day and night. You can handle sleeping in your dog bed on the floor.’”

“Here comes the lure!” said the announcer and the starting box door opened and three Greyhounds fired out. The lure was in front of them, always in front.

“I heard the track is closing this month,” the woman continued. “It’s not because of the new amendment. That doesn’t take effect for another year.”

“Oh,” said Jane, feeling hot.

“The casino says they never wanted to race Greyhounds. It was just some law where they had to race them to have slot machines. No doggies, no slots. The law changed, so they’re ditching the dogs and keeping the slots.”

Jane realized she’d been looking down at her own shirt. It was wet in an outline of her barely pregnant belly.

The Greyhounds had already crossed the finish line and were now trying to stop, the lure retracting. Handlers treated the racers to marshmallows, just like old times.

Owners nearby who’d allowed their Greyhounds to race were discussing diets. One couple swore their Greyhound was vegan.

“Her preference,” one of them said.

“Yes, her preference for all of us,” the other said.

“Bet she won’t eat a marshmallow,” the one said.

“It’s the gelatin,” the other said.

Jane needed to find shade. She tugged at the leash. She needed him to understand her.

“Rilke…” she cried, for that was his name.

*

Jane awoke to the cry of rabbit calls—Greyhound owners directing the EMTs toward her. Where was the leash? She was not wearing the leash. She saw the line in the sandy dirt where she was dragged by Rilke. He must have gone for help.

“Find my Greyhound. He’s microchipped,” Jane said to an EMT as he lifted her onto a stretcher.

“They’re not GPS tracking devices,” the EMT said. “It’s just an ID card under their skin. I had the same misconception until one of my French Bulldogs was taken. Trafficked, likely. You know I’ve heard it gives them tumors.”

*

Gynecologists were in front of her, metal clinking. They were dilating to remove, not to deliver. No heartbeat, no delivery.

“My Greyhound,” Jane said. Is he in here? she thought. Is he watching?

A male doctor wearing a cross necklace came in focus between her legs.

“Greyhounds are the only dog mentioned by name in the King James Bible,” the doctor said.

There was someone else in there with them, a tech or a medical student. She was pushing away the surgical tray and saying, “My uncle is a farmer. He just got a litter of Greyhounds. They were going to be racers. He’s raising them to hunt coyotes.”

“Owls and pelicans are there, too,” Jane said. She was still thinking about the King James Bible, thinking there had been an error in the translation of the Latin, no, Hebrew. The English loved their Greyhounds so much they wrote them into the past. But why were there pelicans?

“The owl and the pelican are similes, Sweetie. But that Greyhound was a Greyhound.”