Iris heard the tussling of bodies tumbling into one another and more laughing. They laughed and said things that made Iris smile and want to be part of them, and even for a moment she shut her eyes and imagined she was a junior or a senior and was a part of them. Flynn was a dick to assign three chapters last night. They talked of video games and TV shows Iris had never played or seen and knew she never would, homework and tests happening that morning, Mr. They talked of love lives, real or imagined, Iris didn’t know. The popular and older kids sat in the back. She smiled at the driver, who once whispered to her that a dryer sheet was sticking out of her pantleg. She wrote her mother a note.īy 6:30 Iris was on her bus to the high school. Inside, she sat at the kitchen table with toast and orange juice. Now Iris shelved the brush and went down the length of the barn, giving each of the other dogs and puppies a pet on the head, behind the ear, or on the rump, depending on what was accessible, then she went back to the little, aluminum-sided house nestled in southern Indiana’s rolling hills. The setter licked Iris’s knee, the denim covering it, as she brushed. Her mom kept all the long-coated dogs clipped short but the long ear fur still matted, if given the time. She brushed the two spaniels’ ears and the English setter’s speckled ears. Iris reached down to move the Yorkie into her pool but the dog popped right back out and was underfoot again, so Iris simply worked faster. “It’s alright,” she told this pen’s dog, “I know you can’t help it.” Gloria said pregnancy was tough on the bladder and the nerves. The Yorkies always peed all over their towels instead of the shavings, and danced circles around Iris’s boots while she worked. Then Iris scooped poop and wet shavings from the pens and put down more bedding and fresh towels where they were needed. “Good girl,” said Iris, stroking her long back. She kneeled at one of the basset hound’s pens because the dog wouldn’t start eating alone. Iris finished filling the water bowls and bottles and poured puppy kibble in all of the food dishes. “You poor thing,” she said to the mother dog, extricating her hand and rubbing the red marks. Iris reached a hand down into the pen and two or three immediately glommed on with needly teeth inside velveteen muzzles. Roly-poly seven-week-old puppies that climbed on one another and their mother nonstop, grunting and snuffling. Iris checked on the Westie, only halfway through her pregnancy, then walked down to the large dogs, the heavily pregnant dalmatian whose flank rippled with movement, and the Lab litter. In the night, the beagle had made a nest out of the towels in the whelping pool but wasn’t pacing or panting yet. She lingered some at her pen, watching the dog. One of the beagles was going to start contractions any day now. Her mom, Gloria, used kiddie pools inside the pens as whelping boxes and while the puppies were still small, the pools prevented them escaping and ensured the mother dogs could nurse them all together. And then the large dogs: the setter, Labs, and dalmatian. Next were the medium dogs: the spaniels, bassets, whippet, and beagles. First came all of the small dogs: the miniature pinscher, Chihuahuas, Yorkies, Westie, and Maltese. The barn had pens for each dog, arranged by breed. Her mom Gloria drove all over Indiana or out to Kentucky or Ohio or sometimes Michigan with her tried-and-true dams to mate them with the best champion studs she could afford, to keep the breeding going and going and going. Right now, there were thirty-seven but sometimes there were only twenty and sometimes there were over fifty. The dogs were her mother’s and they were money. She used to beg-how old had she been then? She didn’t remember it, just the feeling of the want so intense it was like a rock in her mouth-and then she had to stop or she thought maybe she would die from the sadness of it. Iris Garr rose at four every day before school to feed and water the dogs in the barn. A layered exploration of morality and use, rich with conflict and longing, “Origami Dogs” lands a stunning climax with a powerful and moving paragraph in which Iris reveals her deep empathy while defying her mother’s foundational rule. Using a close third-person perspective, Reid writes Iris with compassion and verisimilitude. Main character Iris is in ninth grade, and shares with the dogs in her care a complete lack of agency-throughout this piece we see her discover and begin to challenge the confinement of all childhoods and the neglect in her own childhood, even as she also realizes that her beloved dogs will never be emancipated (see Reid’s author’s note for more about these nameless dogs). Noley Reid’s “Origami Dogs” opens with immersion into specific details of character and place and never lets us go.
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