Tyson found the soap sepulchered in the basement closet: a dozen Dove bars packaged solo, each ivory as starlight. With his pocketknife, he slit one from its cardboard coffin and inhaled his mother’s skin-scent. Two weeks after snagging the soap in a Sam’s Club special, she’d left it all behind, skirting the Great Lake to start a new life with the doctor in Wisconsin.
On the first night of his insomnia, Tyson studied the popcorn ceiling, pretending the protruding specks were stars. He named new constellations across the indigo plain: Porcupinus, the great quilled mountain, Suraci, whose metal wings were more reliable than wax, Emoh, the two-headed serpent. He wove a mythos from vermiculite, spun tales of a fresh zodiac whose every member lived at war. After what he thought were hours, he glimpsed the red slit digits of the clock to discover only minutes had elapsed. On the second night, he took up whittling, wanting to carve something other than his wrists.
By night five, he understood how hard to press the blade—the saw-like stroke needed for shaping, the finesse that crosshatch demanded. The soap was forgiving, peeling with ease beneath the blade-slash. White flecks of it amassed on Tyson’s desk. He formed bears first: lumpy creatures with thin incisions for eyes. When their slender legs proportioned them instead like pit bulls, Tyson took to dogs, shaving ears and snouts, hewing legs and hindquarters. Soon a whole pack of them crowded his desk, each smelling like his mother.
He placed them in his neighbors’ mailboxes during the second week of not sleeping. Slinking out the basement door at 4 a.m., he wandered the deserted roads, slipping a shorthaired pointer among Mrs. L’s nest of bills. He tucked a retriever in old Bruce’s newspaper bin and a German shepherd in the mailbox of the curly-haired woman he’d started spying on at night—when she swam laps bikini-clad in her backyard pool. He’d dripped a bit of wrist-blood on the shepherd by mistake, but it was his best work, a guard dog, a protector, his gift to the woman who by day he’d yet to see divided from her children.
Tyson held onto the husky, a snowy survivalist, braver of the northern earth. Descending a wooden staircase leading to Lake Michigan, he slid the dog along the flat railing. A set of clouds obscured the stars from sight. Tyson loosed a howl in the mute creature’s stead. The sand below seemed a lunar landscape. He sat upon its cratered surface, placing the dog beside him. The lake breeze scattered the smell of his mother. Ignoring his itching wrists, he watched the rise and fall of waves. When the clouds parted, sparks of moonlight shone upon their pointed crests. They paved across the depths a road of silver flecks, glimmering like stars unanchored, impassable as a sleepless night.
