Member Bio: Attila Bronsky
Attila Bronsky has been a member of the Markham Village Writers since 2005, writing fiction and currently working on his first novel.
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Dingo
By Attila Bronsky
I don’t know what kind of dog Dingo was. Depending on the angle you were looking at him, he could have been any black shorthaired small dog: a little bit of dachshund, a little bit of terrier, even a bit of Chihuahua. If the sun hit him the right way, you could see that maybe one of his grandfathers had been a chihuahua. All I knew for sure was he had become a real pain in the ass. At night when I went to bed, he’d follow me upstairs and crouch outside my door. If I moved under the covers, trying to get comfortable in the dark, he’d growl. When I woke up in the mornings, he’d still be crouched outside the door. Sometimes I’d make a fake lunge in his direction and he’d jump back and start yapping. Then I’d hear Nonna from downstairs telling him to shut up, which he did. Wherever I went in the house, he’d be there watching. We’d have long staring matches and neither of us would give in. One day I was lying in bed reading a book called Westward Winds. You’d think a book with a sailboat on the cover would have stories about sailing, or even stories about the sea. But not this one; it was about troubled people taking long journeys and at the end of these journeys, they’d feel better because they’d learned something that changed their lives. I liked it because the stories happened in places I’d never been and created colourful images in my mind.
I heard a grunt and saw movement in the corner of my eye. Dingo was walking into my room. He looked like he was drunk. He staggered over to my jacket on the floor, cocked a leg and pissed on it. I couldn’t believe it.
I jumped up and chased the little bastard downstairs and into the front room, where I cornered him between Nonna’s chesterfield and love seat, pushed the furniture together to block him in and did the only thing I saw fit to do—I pissed on him. He pressed himself against the corner while I showered him good. He started howling and Nonna came running in. She started screaming at me, “Disgraziato!” and went off toward the kitchen. I knew the best place for me at that moment was in my room, and that’s where I was going when I felt a sharp smack against my ass. I turned and saw Nonna standing there with a broom handle, ready to swing again. She hit me across the back before I got away up the stairs two steps at a time.
It was like a nightmare moment with Dingo howling, her screaming and it all being amplified in the stairwell, following me up to my room.
I went to my magic window and sat down, trying to figure out what had just happened. My biggest problem, as I saw it, was how I was going to get downstairs again without having to face that broom handle. After a few minutes, I saw Nonna in the back yard putting a metal washtub on the picnic table. She filled it with water and dropped Dingo in it. She was scrubbing him hard, getting him all lathered up, and he was wagging his tail and looking up at her, acting innocent.
She called me later. I looked over the railing. “Come here,” she said, “I want talk to you.”
I went down to the first landing and stopped there. She said, “Why, why you go pee pee on Dingo? I told you, you no make trouble for me. You say. Yes. Yes. Now you do this?”
“He peed on my jacket,” I told her. “For no reason.”
“Show me,” she said, and I went to my room and brought down the jacket. She took it from me and looked at it. She sniffed it then said, “Okay. Sometime Dingo have accident. He is little dog. But what you do is disgusting. It’s no normal. If you have problem with something, you talk to me. Capito?” I looked at her. I didn’t understand that last part. Cap-?
“Capito? It mean understand, understand?” she said. I nodded. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t an accident, that her pain in the ass little dog didn’t like me but I knew she wouldn’t understand that. Over her shoulder, I saw Dingo looking in through the screen door. I looked at him, he looked at me, then he looked away.
Years later, when I was sixteen and started working for Freddie, on a late spring morning, I was heading to catch my bus when I saw something black at the side of the road. It was Dingo lying on top of a sewer grate. He was still warm, and just looking at him, he looked okay. There was no blood or guts but when I picked him up, he felt broken inside. I took him to the train tracks and laid him down under some brush and covered him with leaves and went back to catch my bus. That evening Nonna asked me if I’d seen Dingo. I said no. She put his food out on the back porch and said, “It is that time of the year. Sometime he go out with other dogs. He come back in the morning.” But Dingo didn’t come back in the morning and as she stood on the back porch and whistled for him, I wanted to tell her he’d never come back. That evening after dinner, she threw on a shawl and went out for a walk. I could hear her in different parts of the neighbourhood, whistling for him. She came back and put out more water and fresh food then went to bed. I decided I was never going to tell Nonna I’d found Dingo. It would have done no good for me or Nonna for her to know Dingo was dead. I wasn’t willing to deal with the emotional hiccups a dead dog would throw into my life with Nonna, so I sat and watched her wonder.
It’s an amazing power to know the truth and not tell. He could have been stolen, or he could have run away and was living with another family; the important and reassuring thing would have been the hope that he was still alive, somewhere.
On the third evening, Nonna stuck her head out the back door and let fly the loudest and longest whistle I’d ever heard. “Maybe he ran away,” I said.
“Dingo no run away. Dingo dead.”
She closed the door and sat in her chair. Then she scrunched up her face and started to cry. Like the many times in my life when I could have reached out and touched someone when they were down, I didn’t move. I just sat there. Not even for Nonna, who I had grown to love and need. In the back of my mind, I was thinking it was only a dog. It was only a dog. And she’ll get over it.
The next morning, Nonna took Dingo’s bowls and his food and threw them in the garbage. She went to the glass case where she kept pictures of her dead relatives, opened it and Scotch-taped a picture of Dingo as a pup in the bottom right corner. I told her I’d get her a puppy. She said,” No more dogs. I have one dog. He die, now no more dogs.”
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The Anniversary
By Attila Bronsky
We were waiting for a delivery in the shipping office. Freddie had brought his girlfriend, Gin. They were going out afterwards, but she was already drunk. I was still thinking about Freddie’s problem with Louie. Looking at Gin there, I couldn’t understand if Louie was supposedly fucking Freddie’s wife; why Freddie had a problem with that since he was cheating on her too. I guess it was the way I was looking at Gin and then at him that made Freddie say, “I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t ever explain myself to nobody, but I’ve come to really like you David, like you could be my little brother. As far as I’m concerned you’re family now, so I’m gonna tell you a story.” He paused then said, “It was my seven-year wedding anniversary. That’s a big deal right?”
I shrugged.
“Seven years with the same broad? That’s a major accomplishment I think. So I went all out. I talked to her boss to let her out early. I rented a limo. Got tickets to one of those fag shows downtown, got us a room at the Four Seasons, even made reservations at a fancy shmancy French restaurant. That’s class, right? French is class, right? I wanted everything to be classy for my girl. So I show up at her work with a big bunch of flowers. The limo’s parked outside. The girls in the office are all falling over themselves at my thoughtfulness. You know what she did? She rolled her eyes at me.” He shook his head, and repeated, “She rolled her eyes at me,” then paused again. “You want a beer? I gotta have a beer.”
He stood up and walked to a small fridge behind the shipper’s desk. He came back with a couple of beers, cracked one open for me, held it out, and sat there holding his unopened bottle, then continued, “We go to the limo, I open the door, like a gentleman would open the door for his lady, right? But before she gets in, she says, “How much did this cost?” Now I’m trying to keep cool. This isn’t the reaction I was expecting, obviously, but hey, the night is still young and lots more fun to come right? She said she wasn’t dressed to go out. She had to go home and change. Now, you’ve seen her. She’s always dressed to the tits. I told her she looked fine. She said, a little too loud for my taste, “I’ve been wearing these clothes since eight o’clock this morning. I need to change!” The driver looked at us in the rear-view mirror. So we go to the house. You believe it? She wastes an hour getting dressed, and now I got to tell the driver to hurry up or we’re gonna be late for the restaurant. She just sat there, arms folded, looking pissed. You know, I got feelings too. I’m sitting there thinking of all those times she wanted to do things, always telling me that if she didn’t think of it herself, that if she didn’t make the arrangements, we’d always be sitting at home. She told me for once, for once, I’d like you to think of something. She told me she wasn’t going to become a wallflower. So here we are, doing something, and she’s still ticked.” He opened his beer and downed half of it.
“We get to the restaurant. The place had a real romantic lighting about it. I thought, this’ll soften her up. I get the menu but I can’t read a fucking thing on it. It’s all in French. The only word I know is Hollandaise. So I get a plate of some kind of meat with Hollandaise sauce on it, and you know what, I liked it. Very tasty. Different. She ordered some kind of fish. She didn’t like it. She said the food was phony food. Overpriced. It wasn’t real food. It was fake art on a plate. “How can anybody satisfy their hunger by eating some abstract, small portioned presentation?” she said. I never heard her talk like this; like she got smart all of the sudden. Philosophical and like. You know, I heard somewhere that a woman’s brain is smaller than a man’s brain.”
I said, “That’s only in proportion to body mass. They’re no less intelligent than men.”
Freddie thought a moment. “Oh, yeah?” He looked over at Gin who was pushing buttons on the Xerox machine. He said to her, “Watch you don’t break that thing.” He turned to me and shook his head. “So now dinner’s over, and we’re headed for the show. She’s not even a bit curious as to what we’re going to see. But I picked a good one; the one with Donny Osmond in it; the story from the Bible about Joseph and his amazing multicolored raincoat. I picked that one because she said she used to love Donny Osmond when she was a kid. I heard her. I listen. I was getting excited just thinking about seeing her face light up. You think she got excited when Donny came onstage? Nothing. She sat there like a lump on a log; bored. Looking at her watch. But you know, I liked the show; it had funny bits. I didn’t know live theatre could look so polished. Okay, now the show’s over. Now comes the surprise. I said, “You wanna meet Donny Osmond? I made arrangements.” She said, “No.”
I said, “But baby, you loved Donny Osmond.” She turned to me with the sourest puss I’d ever seen on anybody and said, “I was a little girl once, now I’m a woman. I want to leave?” I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned. What the hell did I do this for? Not for me. I could give two shits for Hollandaise sauce and Donny Osmond. I blew a shitload of money for this fucking special occasion, and what do I get in return? You know, the money she makes is her money. The money I make is our money, but that’s okay. I don’t have a problem with that. I’m willing to share. But there ain’t no sharing going on here from her; she’s become a one-way street. When all was said and done, we went to the hotel. I made myself a drink, she took a shower; then she came to bed. We got in bed, and you know what she did?” Freddie was looking at me expecting me to know. I shrugged. “She went to sleep! She rolled over and went to sleep. No goodnight, no thank you, and most of all no sex. It’s our anniversary for Christ’s sakes and not even a blowjob to tie me over. What the fuck? She just rolled over and went to sleep, to hell with me. Not even a peck on the forehead. Nothing. Now you’re saying to yourself, did you expect any sex even after she pretty well trashed the whole evening, and I say yeah, why not? We’re married aren’t we? It’s our anniversary isn’t it? I did my best so how about some wifely duty here? What’s she got to complain about? She lives in a nice house, drives a nice car. She can buy anything she practically wants, and I’m responsible for all that, so how about something for me?” He finished the rest of his beer and put the empty bottle on the floor beside him.
“Now, I got two beautiful little girls and I wouldn’t ever do anything to destroy their sense of security, but I’m a man. The pressures of life build up inside me till I need to explode, and she ain’t helping me explode, so I gotta find another outlet and I end up with this.” He waved a hand towards Gin who had a chair up against the Xerox machine. She said she wanted to Xerox her ass for Freddie; a keepsake for when she wasn’t around so Freddie wouldn’t forget her. As she sat on top of the copier glass, and the beam of light crossed from one side to the other she looked at me and said, “I really do have a nice tushy.”
Freddie laughed and said, “That’s right, if you didn’t have that ass you’d have nothing.” She smiled but I sensed sadness behind it.
I said, “Ginger’s a nice girl. There’s a lot more to her than her bum.” She jumped off the copier and stumbled over to me. “Oh, no,” she said, “no. You’ve got that wrong. My name’s not Ginger.” She whispered in my ear, “It’s Ginesta.” She giggled. “Isn’t that the silliest name you ever heard?” She moved her face close to mine and stared into my eyes. She said, “Do you want me to make you a copy of my bum too?” I looked over at Freddie who shrugged.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said. “It’s my bum. All of Freddie’s friends have seen my bum.” And then she backed up and fell off her shoes. Freddie stood and helped her to her feet. He said, “Slow down pumpkin, you’ve got the rest of your life.” Then he turned to me and said, “She ain’t no brain surgeon but she gets the job done.”