Despite everything I knew about what happens
to loose dogs, I let my first dog run loose at night.
It’s what my father had done when I was a kid.
Husky-wolf mix—I’m lucky she wasn’t shot.
She’s luckier. I don’t know what I thought
I was giving her. Loosely, freedom, the kind
I had as a too-young teenager. I begged for it,
the same way the dog scratched at the door,
both of us endangered by the thing we craved.
My father probably believed a girl could run free
the same way a boy could—the most lethal dangers
boys faced were the ones they posed to themselves.
They were also the most lethal danger girls faced.
In the movies I watched, the goal of a girl’s adventure
was a boy, so the goal and the danger were the same.
My story wasn’t about my path, but the paths
it might intersect. When I was a child, our dogs
ran loose, and all chose paths that intersected
with shotguns or cars or in one case, both.
They ran free until they didn’t. They came home
until they didn’t. Not one of them died of old age.
I do not doubt my father loved these dogs.
He believed he was giving them the life a dog
should have. When they lunged against their tethers,
he pulled some slack in the cable, released the clip,
whispering “Go on!” And we did.
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