Page 4 of Slashed Bonds

I don’t remember the overtime goal.

I remember standing in the corner afterward with my helmet off, breathing the cold coming up off the ice, snow shavings melting into my collar, thinking with absolute certainty:

I’m going to spend my whole life doing this.

Nine days.

That’s the distance between that shift and this washroom.

I flex my fingers. The stitches pull.

It drags me back to the tile and the humming light and the smell of my own ruined scent.

There’s a television bolted high on a bracket in the corridor outside, muted, captions running.

It’s been showing my house for two hours.

Our house.

The blue one on Alder Row, with the crooked porch step my dad never fixed and the driveway net whose crossbar I bent at nine with a shot I still consider the finest of my career.

Structure fire, the chyron says. Cause undetermined.

The footage is aerial. The roof is gone. What’s underneath glows like an oven element, and the crews on scene are wetting the neighbors’ siding instead of fighting anything.

Even I know what that means.

There’s nothing left in there worth saving.

Every photograph. Every recording my mother took on her phone with her thumb over the lens for the first forty seconds. Every letter, every folder, every scrap of paper that could prove any of us were the people we said we were.

And Knox.

The thought arrives whole, and there’s no stepping out of its way.

Six years old. Ninety percent fur and bad decisions. Eighty pounds of a breed that was supposed to stop at twenty-five. One blue eye, one brown. The day I picked him up, he climbed out of the box and into my hoodie and refused every other hand that reached for him.

He chose me.

Nobody chooses me the way that dog chose me.

He sleeps against the backs of my knees. He carries a half-destroyed stick toy from room to room like a diplomat with a briefcase.

He was in the house…

He was in the house, and I’m here in a bathroom that smells of gardenia.

I can’t go into the flames to choose him back…

My hand goes to my mouth. I bite down on the meat of my thumb to keep the sound in, and I bite harder than I mean to. Copper floods my tongue. Blood beads bright on my bottom lip where I’ve split it.

I watch the drop swell in the mirror and feel precisely nothing about it.

Whoever did this wanted to hurt me at every angle…and are succeeding.

I press the heels of my hands to my temples. The headache has been with me for three days, a nail behind my right eye, arriving with the dressings and the paperwork. It flares. Everything flares. My arms. My ribs where I hit the frame going out the window. My jaw from clenching in my sleep.

The body I can survive. Bodies are equipment. You tape them, and you go back out.