Whenever I visit a library or bookstore, I inevitably beeline to the writing section. Recently I discovered and enjoyed Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories. For this collection, Andre Dubus III invited seasoned writers to write about two short stories that changed their perspectives on life and that inspired them to pen something equally meaningful. The writers’ insights, especially about connections they discovered between their chosen stories, prompted me to think about stories I admire. Two came readily to mind: Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” and David Means’s “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog.”
Although I don’t remember when I first read Link’s “Stone Animals”—it may have been in her story collection Magic for Beginners or in The Best American Short Stories 2005—I do remember specific, haunting details, such as Catherine, the pregnant mother, obsessively painting and repainting all the rooms in the family’s new house in upstate New York; the long absences of her husband, Henry, as he commutes to his job in New York City; and especially the creepy mood arising from the growing number of rabbits staked out on the front lawn. There’s also nine-year-old, sleepwalking Tilly, who wants to befriend the rabbits, and her six-year-old brother, Carleton, who is afraid of the new house, his new school, big dogs (I’m right there with you, Carleton; more on this later), and the rabbits. Oh, and did I mention that items, such as Carleton’s toothbrush, Catherine’s diamond earrings, and the dishwasher become haunted and, thus, off-limits?
Earlier this year, I read David Means’s “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog” in The Best American Short Stories 2021. In this story, a middle-aged dachshund, who belongs to a recent widower, Norman, gets lost in a forest and is found, adopted, and renamed by another, younger couple, Steve and Luisa. What’s remarkable about this story is that it’s told from the dog’s point of view.
What both stories share, of course, the obvious yet, to me, intriguing and compelling element is animals.
In Link’s story, rabbits run the roost, so to speak. They occupy the front lawn, infiltrate the house via a hidden dirt staircase, and emerge in the characters’ conversations and dreams. Tilly, for instance, dreams about sticking her arm inside a rabbit’s mouth, all the way to her shoulder, and touching something “small and cold and hard.” Henry dreams that he’s “the king of real estate agents” and tries to sell a house to a young couple, until he realizes that they have no money, because they are rabbits. Catherine, six months’ pregnant, feels the baby “kicking the daylights out of” her all day and jokingly wonders if she might be “going to give birth to rabbits.” She gives Henry “a green silk robe with orange sleeves and heraldic animals in orange and gold threads.” Henry identifies them as lions, but Catherine says they’re rabbits and remarks that he “looks like the king of rabbits . . . The emperor of Rabbitaly.” When Henry again tries to convince his boss to let him work from home as they’d originally agreed, she points out that he has everything: a wife and children who adore him, a house in the country, a secure job, a boss who values his talents. “‘You think you have to give up something,’ she says, ‘But you don’t . . . and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fucking rabbit.’” Rabbits rule the story’s world, and not for the betterment of its human characters.
Beyond the omnipresent rabbits, Link tosses in other animal details. As the real estate agent shows the family the house, Carleton lays down on his stomach and curls “like a dead snake around Henry’s ankles.” While Henry privately refers to his boss as “the Crocodile,” she frequently fixes her “reptilian, watery gaze” on him and continues to enlarge a rubber band ball that looks like “some kind of eyeless, hairless, legless animal. Maybe a dog. A Carleton-sized dog.” Catherine quits her job, in part because her whole academic department is leaving, “[l]ike rats deserting a sinking ship.” Tilly stashes her valuable belongings inside a stuffed armadillo made into a purse. While the often-unexpected appearance of animals, in similes, metaphors, and images, delights, their abundance can also feel overwhelming, as if we humans are outnumbered and surrounded. Link’s choice of animals—reptiles, rodents, and a mammal encased in scales— may engender curiosity, but they also elicit in both characters and readers unease, fear, and/or dread.
And those furry rabbits do nothing to mitigate our deepening disquiet. On the contrary. Often, we picture rabbits as cute, fluffy creatures with floppy ears, twitching noses, and adorable cottontail rumps. Think Easter bunny, Peter Rabbit, or Thumper in Bambi. Yes, there are other depictions, such as tricksters Br’er Rabbit and Bugs Bunny, Lewis Carroll’s nervous White Rabbit and madly confused March Hare, and the speedy, long-lasting Energizer Bunny. But none of these characters possess the persistent eeriness of Link’s rabbits. These animals frighten Carleton, haunt the family’s dreams and appliances, and trouble their reality. How can they stop their house from becoming a giant sinkhole? Must they gas the rabbits as the exterminator recommends? Even Tilly, who in seeking to befriend the rabbits, lies down on the lawn and lets them leap over her and subsequently insists they were protecting her, later suffers a throbbing stab wound on the back of her hand from a tiny spear wielded by a tiny man riding one of the rabbits.
The idea of war with the rabbits surfaces early, when, in a dream, an exterminator warns Henry, “[T]his is war. The lives of your children are at stake. The happiness of your family. . . Just hang on to your rabbit and fire when you see delight in their eyes.” On another night, Catherine spies the rabbits leaping and landing and freezing on the lawn. She wonders if they are playing a game or dancing or “fighting a rabbit war. Did rabbits fight wars? Catherine didn’t know.” Her musings and the bomb scare in the city foreshadow the bizarre yet fitting ending when—spoiler alert—among a lawn full of rabbits ridden by miniature men, Henry sits astride his very own rabbit and, spear in hand, waits for his wife’s dinner party to end and for the war to begin.
In Link’s story, albeit living, breathing, sentient, emotional beings, animals are others and enemies of the human characters. However, in David Means’s “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog,” the canine protagonist invites readers to experience the world through an animal’s eyes, in short, to empathize.
I admit I’m no dog lover. This may stem from the upset I experienced as a toddler when my great-uncle’s huge black lab, Ernie, made a game of sneaking up behind me and grabbing my “diaper,” an old white cloth that functioned as my security blanket. Ernie would run a few feet ahead, while I, surprised, indignant, would toddle in pursuit, and just before I could reach out and reclaim my prized possession, Ernie would take off again. Eventually an adult relative would take pity on me and halt Ernie’s game. Although I have no real recollection of any of this, I suspect deep-seated memories and other people’s frequent retellings of the Ernie-versus-Colleen game contributed to my dislike and occasional fear of dogs.
And yet I thoroughly enjoyed David Means’s “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog,” which, to my surprise and from the outset, evokes a lot of emotion.
In the opening paragraph, Clementine, a caramel-colored dachshund, scurries along a forest path and “nervously” veers from one side to the other. Sniffing the ground and air, she detects “the familiar scent of river water . . . a delightful and—under other circumstances—soothing smell that in the past had arrived to her in the house when her person, Norman, opened the windows.” The words “nervously” and “under other circumstances” alert us that something is amiss, and the promise of a problem, or maybe even peril, propels us to the next paragraph. Meanwhile, the description of Norman as “her person” places us firmly inside the dog’s perspective.
While we humans typically rely on sight as our primary means of interacting with the world, Clementine favors smell. Part of the story’s pleasure lies in vicariously experiencing the world through Clementine’s snout. Lost in the forest, she catches “the smell of a bear in a cloak of limestone dust from the quarry, and inside the same cloak was a raccoon she knew, the one that had rummaged around Norman’s garbage cans, and then, of course, deer—they were everywhere.” Later that night, Clementine dreams she’s in the car with Norman, her face out the window, her nose “thrust into a fantastic blast of beach and salt marsh and milkweed chaff.” The next morning, a man finds her. “The flat of his palm offered something like coconut, wheat flour, hemp, and, as an underscent, the appealing smell of spicy meat.” While the potpourri of smells and the novelty of perceiving the world through one’s nose proves a constant delight, Clementine’s olfactory detection also extends to human emotion, especially grief.
Early in the story, as Norman prepares to take Clementine for a walk, she sniffs at the crack in the door and catches “the smell that would never leave the house, the mix of patchouli and ginger that was Claire.” Clementine spots, too, “the stark, earthy smell that she’d noticed one day near Claire’s armpit . . . It was the smell of death.” Norman has lost his wife, Claire, most likely to cancer. Like all dogs, Clementine is attuned to changes in the chemical compounds of human breath and sweat. She notes Norman’s grief when he begins to give off “his own sad odor of metal and salt.” And in her new home, Clementine discerns that Luisa has “a smell similar to Claire’s, gingery and floral with a faint verdant bready odor that—Clementine felt this, in her dog way—united them in a special way.” More specifically, Clementine, now Carmelita, recognizes “a lost child (or lost pup) type of grief.” While Norman grieves for his wife, Steve and Luisa mourn the loss of their child.
Grief permeates the story, forms its emotional core. Instead of experiencing grief from the humans’ perspective, though, we perceive it through the dog’s. Clementine notices Claire’s absence, “the strange way of humans” had of disappearing, and thereafter the change in Norman, how “since Claire had disappeared the sound of his whistle had grown slack, lower in tone.” Trying to make Norman happy, Clementine grabs and tosses his socks and leans against him while he reads on the couch, but eventually, “she began to carry her own grief.” Although she’s eager to explore her new home, the grief all over Luisa and throughout the house affects the dog’s mood. She also misses the freedom she experienced in the forest and feels that “Norman somewhere outside was still calling her name, or whistling.” In short, Clementine/Carmelita mourns the loss of her former life.
Happily, though, and unlike her human counterparts, Clementine/Carmelita exults in the present moment and takes care of her humans as much as, if not more than, the humans take care of her.
With the passage of time and with the comfort of their found dog, Steve and Luisa’s grief wanes enough for them to try to conceive again. One morning Carmelita notices “a small thump in Luisa’s belly, a movement.” Licking Luisa’s skin, Carmelita tastes “the tangy salt of new life.” Steve, in fact, associates Carmelita’s “mystical” appearance in the woods with Luisa’s subsequent pregnancy.
Clementine saves Norman as well. As he leads her into the forest that fateful morning, he carries a gun. Near the story’s end, off leash on a walk with Steve, Carmelita picks up a faint trace of Norman’s smell, and takes off running. As she zips into the yard, Norman lifts her up and tells her how much he missed her, confiding, “. . . and when you were gone I knew I had to go on.” Her disappearance goads him to forsake his suicide plan and to live so that he can find her again.
Whereas Link’s animals, especially the rabbits, foment unrest and discord, Means’s dachshund cares for humans and helps strengthen the connection between the two species.
Both writers strive to avoid anthropomorphizing the animal characters, but their approaches, or narrative filters, differ. Thanks to her use of night-time logic, Link’s characters inhabit a world where everything feels off-kilter (e.g., the humans constantly contradict themselves), and where the fantastical (e.g., haunted lightbulbs, spooky rabbits) becomes a new normal. Means, on the other hand, pursues a more realistic tack. While telling a story from a dog’s point of view is a form of defamiliarization, Means creates a naturalistic world, where bears roam the woods, a skunk spreads its smell like ink, and Clementine makes a bed in the pine needles, “lowering her nose on her paws . . . while the cool air” blankets her back. Despite his endeavors, Means cannot completely maintain the dog’s perspective. He admits in the Contributors’ Notes that “no matter what, I’d be writing a projection onto the animal mind and the story would ultimately be about the human world.”
This accounts for his use of an unnamed human narrator, who occasionally interjects and explains what Clementine/Carmelita seemingly cannot. For example, on the morning Norman dangles Clementine’s leash, he also gets a tool from a drawer, “an oil and saltpeter thing that made a frightening sound.” Here a narrator interrupts with a direct address within a parenthetical aside: “(Don’t get me wrong. She knew it was a gun, but she didn’t have a name for it—it was an object that had frightened her.)” Unlike Chekhov’s, this gun never goes off, and I appreciate the thwarting of this expectation. Like Means, the narrator feels acutely aware of his shortcomings: “In this account, as much as possible, dog has been translated into human, and like any such translation, the human version is a thin, feeble approximation of what transpired in Clementine’s mind as she stood in the woods crying and hungry.” The narrator’s acknowledgement that we can never truly understand what an animal experiences contributes to the story’s realism. In other words, the use of a human narrator denotes the real-life boundary between our perception and an animal’s reality.
And yet, as much as I appreciated this narrative device, some of the narrator’s claims gave me pause or spurred me to fact-check. For instance, the narrator asserts that Carmelita’s nose contains sensors “a million times more sensitive to odor than your own.” Skeptical, I did a quick online search and found different sources indicating that a dog can smell anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000 times better than humans; a million, though, is probably an exaggeration. When a bulldog’s snorts and sneezes emit “a cornucopia of aromas, mint weed, leathery jerky Arctic vegetation, even a hint of caribou,” which he had “drawn in from the northern wind and stored for future examination,” I wondered: Can dogs store smells? From another internet search I learned that in a dog nose, a basal plate of bone known as the Lamina Transversa creates a shelf or recess to which scent molecules accumulate. This storage of scent allows dogs to detect the faintest of odors. Indeed, according to Alexandra Horowitz, a dog cognition scientist at Barnard College in New York City, “a dog can detect a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water: two-Olympic sized pools.”1 Later, when Clementine is lost in the forest, she has memories of Norman and Claire. The narrator interrupts to explain that “dog memory is not at all like human memory . . . Dog memory isn’t constructed along temporal lines, gridded out along a distorted timeline, but rather in an overlapping and of course deeply olfactory manner.” However, a study suggests that dogs do, in fact, possess some degree of episodic memory.2 While I didn’t research another narrative claim that “There are fifty-seven varieties of dog grief, just as there are—from a dog’s point of view—110 distinct varieties of human grief,” I suspect the information is inaccurate. Although the lack of scientific rigor occasionally disrupted the narrative for me (and this isn’t to say that researchers know everything there is to know about dogs), experiencing the story from Clementine/Carmelita’s point of view with its accretion of images, smells, and memories evoked in me a strong emotional response, which is one hallmark of a successful story.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not point out the presence of rabbits. Although neither creepy nor menacing as those in Link’s story, rabbits in “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog” still prove troublesome.
Clementine’s predicament of getting lost happens after she catches sight of a cottontail. Frozen in place in a clearing, the rabbit offers “a pure but confusing temptation.” No sooner does the rabbit dash away than Clementine gives chase—“with all four paws leaving the ground with each stretched-out bound. There was nothing like those bounds! Slowed down in dog time it was a sublime joy, the haunches tightening, spreading out, and then coiling—she could feel this sensation!” Ours and Clementine’s satisfaction in this chase cease when the rabbit darts over a creek and Clementine follows only to find the rabbit long gone and herself “lost for the first time in her life.”
Weeks after she has settled into her new home with Steve and Luisa, Clementine, now Carmelita, encounters the rabbit in a dream. Offering “its big, pooling eyes,” the rabbit speaks “in the language of dog. . . It spoke loudly of all things that had gone into the past and all of the things that might, like a slice of meat, appear in the future.” The rabbit then scurries toward a mountain. Carmelita barks both in her dream and in her bed and then moves in “gravity-free bounds over velvety grass” until she wakes with a start. A memory from her past, the rabbit now presages her future.
“One night in August she was chasing the rabbit again, a ball of white movement.” Perhaps because of the rabbit’s speed, Carmelita sees only the rabbit’s white tail, and yet this description instantly calls to my mind the white rabbit Alice pursues in Lewis Carroll’s novel. In Carmelita’s dream, the rabbit doesn’t zig or zag but instead runs in a straight line, which enrages Carmelita. Keeping her head down, the dog pursues the rabbit without playfulness. The rabbit races up a familiar hill to the door of a house. There, the rabbit stops and turns, “as if offering itself.” Carmelita lunges and clamps down on the rabbit’s neck. She shakes the rabbit and as she starts to taste its blood, “gamey and warm,” she hears Steve’s voice and awakes. The vivid details of the dog’s killing a rabbit fade when the narrator reappears to ask, “Was it possible that the dream indicated what was to come? Of course she would never think of it that way, because she wasn’t bound by the logic of causality.” The narrator observes that this dream simply overlapped with what happened on a future afternoon when Steve took her for a hike on the path. We humans, however, not only rely on causality but also appreciate when dreams and life seem to interact.
We also enjoy endings that mirror beginnings. As at the start of the story, one day Carmelita goes on a walk with her human. Trotting off leash, she detects a faint trace of Norman’s smell. Steve calls and whistles her back, but he doesn’t wait as long “and the dynamic was somehow different.” Running along, she happens upon a rabbit eating clover in a clearing. Carmelita barks. The rabbit freezes then scampers away and leaps across a creek. The “smart old rabbit” disappears, and Carmelita slows down, nose to the ground, and picks up Norman’s smell again. Propelled by instinct, she pursues Norman’s scent until she’s returned home, and the dog and human reunite.
In the Contributors’ Notes, Means admits that “[w]riting from an animal perspective, as far away from the human as I could go, was a relief.” Reading his story and Link’s “Stone Animals” proves an entertaining escape for me as well, as does writing animal characters in my literary fiction (e.g., a Hawaiian goose in “Nēnēs”) and picture books. Whether we inhabit a dog’s perspective or confront the startling antagonism of a colony of rabbits, animal characters can teach us much not only about the animal kingdom but also about ourselves.
What are some of your favorite animal characters in literature? What effects do animal characters achieve in your own writing?
NOTES
1 Morell, Virginia, “Your Dog Remembers More Than You Think,” Science (November 23, 2016): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal0424.
2 Fugazza, C., Pongrácz, P., Pogány, Á. et al. “Mental Representation and Episodic-Like Memory of Own Actions in Dogs.” Scientific Reports 10, 10449 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-67302-0.
