Flings by Justin Taylor Page B

against his back, and slides her arms around his waist—thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans. Yreka licks her chops, then grabs her youngest pup by the scruff. She plunks it over by its brothers and sisters, four—now five—wrinkled pink things mewling in residual slime. By the time it’s over, Yreka has whelped nine puppies. Scott knows from the brochure to expect to lose a few of these, but there’s no apparent runt, and by the evening of the next day it’s clear that the whole litter will survive. Life becomes a blur of tiny bodies in harmless ceaseless collision. Mouths yip and teeth nip and new claws emerge and scratch. The living room is transformed into a nursery, and the whole apartment stinks of shit and newspapers. Yreka’s teats bleed from the rough, unending attention: her blond muzzle shows its first threads of white, tired pride now inscribed in her watery wise brown eyes. Scott loves the puppies but doesn’t know how he would have managed without Olivia. She’s over at his place so often he winds up making her a key.

MIKE’S SONG
    M ike Beckstein’s in his kitchen, sitting at the small round table, drinking a glass of organic, pulp-free orange juice, idly regarding but not precisely looking at his MacBook. Ken and Angie, his grown son and daughter, are in their respective childhood bedrooms, going through their closets and drawers. It’s the last week of December—and good riddance, as far as Mike’s concerned; ’09 was a shit year. Come spring he and Miranda are selling the place—thus completing, finally, their divorce settlement—so the kids have to decide what’s important enough to keep and what can be thrown away, which so far seems to be pretty much everything.
    There are three tabs open in Firefox and a to-do list in an unsaved Word doc. Behind those windows, and therefore at the moment entirely hidden from view, his desktop wallpaper is a photo from the 2007 Masters of himself with defending champ Phil Mickelson—who later that same day would surprise everyone by blowing his opening rounds and nearly getting cut.
    Ken, shouting down the hallway: “Why does every trip down memory lane seem to end at the city dump?”
    Angie, calling back to her brother: “Maybe if American childhood consisted of more than collecting every last Beanie Baby and fucking baseball card . . .” This comment not explicitly a dig at Mike—though not explicitly not a dig either—just the words of a hard-nosed progressive reduced by present circumstance to her inner pissed-off teen. And it’s true that the only thing the kids remember about most of this stuff is buying it: the jolt of commercial desire followed by the soft shock of success as the parental wallet opened—and then the getting bored. A long day of Internet price checking—Mike’s job, hence the tabs and list—has yielded little. All this stuff really is junk: the small black-eyed bears forlorn in their Ziploc baggies; a Mike Piazza rookie in a plastic screw case; all five installments of DC Comics’s “limited edition” Zero Hour series, each issue in its own polymer sleeve with white cardboard backer. The complete set, mint condition, on eBay right now, is going for ten bucks. Now the Piazza card, on the other hand, might have been worth some real cash if it had been mint—and a Bowman instead of a Fleer, but what can you do? Not like they need the money. But it would’ve been—what? Validating, somehow, and a nice surprise if even one of these things had paid out.
    Anyway, it’s about time to knock off and hit the road. They’ve got tickets to go see the kids’ favorite group, the Phish, play the first of four concerts at the Miami Arena—technically American Airlines Arena now, but Mike prefers the old name, just as he’ll always think of the stadium where the Dolphins play as Joe