Hayan Charara

The phone call, from my wife. She’s hungry, she’s pregnant, someone kicked her in the stomach—we have to. I say yes, but the reply I keep to myself is, We don’t have to do a goddamn thing. A dog. I’m talking about a dog I would have otherwise left to starve. Now though, five years since, I love this animal, Lucy, more than I can most people. • A boy names his dog and five cats after our Lucy. The boy, my brother, born in Henry Ford’s hometown, lives now in Lebanon, which the Greeks called Phoenicia, and they tried but failed to subdue it, same as the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, the British, the French, the Israelis. There, my father built a house with money earned in Detroit— as a grocer, with social security. Also there, the first alphabet was created, the first law school built, the first miracle of Jesus— water, wine. • On the first day the bombs fall they flee and the boy asks to go back for Lucy, the dog. As for the cats, No. They take care of themselves. One week into it he wonders who feeds them, who fills the water bowls. Maybe the neighbors, the mother thinks out loud. The father is indignant:Neighbors— what neighbors? They’re gone. The mother is stunned: What do you mean, gone? After a month, everyone forgets or just stops talking about the animals. During the ceasefire my father drives south, a thirty-minute trip that lasts six hours—wreckage upon wreckage piled on the roads, on what is left of the roads. The landscape entirely gray, so catastrophic he asks a passerby how far to his town and is told, You’re in it. • My father finds three of the cats, all perforated, one headless. The dog is near the carport, where it hid during lightning storms, its torso splayed in half like meat on a slab, its entrails eaten by other dogs scavenging on the streets. Look. They’re animals. Which is to say, there are also people. And I haven’t even begun telling you what was done to them.