Daddy's Read Free

table where I’d left it, coiled awkwardly. The alarm we never seemed to turn on gave its three warning beeps—a door is opening—but it was loudest downstairs, and I knew Tim wouldn’t hear a thing.
     
    The grass felt good under my feet, I couldn’t tell if it was wet or cold, or both. It was like walking on one of those massage pads at those gadget stores—a welcome, dull pain. At my corner I reached under my nightgown and pulled my underwear down and held the collar to the skin just above where my pubic hair stopped. I told myself I should be afraid, that this could really hurt, but then I leaned into that invisible boundary, and it was wonderful. For a moment I was convinced I could feel it in my fillings. I moved the collar down and leaned in, the feeling was so intense that a few drops of urine escaped and clung to my thighs.
     
    On my back in the grass the night sky looked close enough to touch and then I had the strange feeling that I was floating, that I wasn’t lying in the grass, that I was rushing up too quickly into the night and that I would break through the layers of the earth to freefall through space forever. It was the loneliest feeling and I left my place in the grass and went back to the house and up the stairs to our bed. The room smelled like sleep—like deep breaths and sheets and the warm bitter musk of bodies—and when I lay down Tim turned over in sleep and molded his body to mine and Marky let out a long sigh. My underwear was wet and cold and I wished I had taken it off.
     
    Just before lunch a man in a white hat and overalls came to disable the fence.
     
    “Your husband called me?” he said.
     
    The damp strap of Marky’s collar dangled from my finger behind my back; I’d run into the house from the fence when I’d seen the man’s truck pulling off the road onto our driveway. Beneath my skirt, my underwear was around my knees and I was sure the man could smell the sharpness of the urine.
     
    “I’m here to turn off your fence?” He said it like, “ye fayuhnts?”
     
    It was over in fifteen minutes. The man walked to the four corners of our property and aimed a large square remote at them and punched at the keypad, then came inside and took Marky’s collar to be recycled. When he was outside I’d pressed a wet cloth to it. “I washed it. That’s why it’s a little wet,” I told him.
     
    Before he left he told me that the fence was disabled, but that if we ever wanted it turned back on to call him, that it was still there. “Everything’s as it was,” he said. “The only thing missing is the electricity. The spark,” he said, patting Marky’s head, “for Sparky here.”
     
    Tim came home and when I was bending to take his potpie from the oven he pulled the sweatpants and underwear I’d changed into down to my knees and stuck his pinky in my anus. “Okay?” he whispered into my hair. I held onto the stove and watched myself in its flat surface, Tim’s face appearing suddenly, his eyes closed, mouth open, a lock of hair loose on his forehead. “Oh. Kay. Ohh. Kay,” he said.
     
    He ate the potpie with his fingers, sucking them triumphantly when he was done, even, at one point, the pinky that had been in my ass.
     
    At the door he kissed me, the flick of his tongue at my bottom lip. “God, I love you. I really do. I’m positively joyful,” he said, “giddy.”
     
    I watched him back down the driveway, his hand in a flat wave. I let Marky lick the potpie dish, let him push it across the floor until it bumped against the baseboard. When I took the plate away Marky went to his water bowl and drank, his big tongue making sloppy, satisfying sounds. When he was done I let him out, collarless and free.
     

    I filled the sink with soap and hot water—as hot as it would go—and plunked the potpie dish into the suds. From the window above the sink I watched Marky bounding from edge to edge. He believed the fence was still there and stopped just short of its