Shadow Wall

I hoped to take the wall apart, breaking it into tiny crumbs. But my friend was collaging it with blackbirds torn from the pages of a magazine.

On the first day I just watched her. I didn’t know if it was an omen. My collaging friend was dating this macho guy. I didn’t want to go around attracting macho guys too.

On the second day, I brought some pictures and cut outs of dark mammals, deciding I’d risk it. But a second friend was there at the wall, watching us collaging. She was jealous of me spending so much time with my blackbird pasting friend and placed her hands on her hips. She screwed her face into a threat. I took her picture and glued it onto my section of wall. This appeased her, it appeared, though that’s not why I did it.

On the third day, my un-macho partner and my dead grandmother accompanied me to the wall. The three of us desperately searched for our lost dog. She wasn’t by the wall, the dog, though my blackbird collaging friend pasted an old photograph of her sitting as if a treat was beyond the lens. (It was.)

There was my sweet lost dog, shellacked beside the photo I took of my threatening friend, who was Modpodged beside a cluster of pointed black cutouts of crows.

Aside from staring at my dog’s empty picture or taking the wall apart piece by piece and looking inside of it, as I envisioned, there was nowhere else we could search for our lost dog in this location. So, we went to the mall.

It seemed logical at the time, that our dog would be there roaming past the scents of cinnamon and pizza. Instead, we found something more unlikely, though not terribly so for the season, a black bear. She was lounging in the cement planter with the imported trees, right there at the mall’s entrance. My grandmother reached out and stroked her coarse fur. She hadn’t been so brave when she was alive, but something came over her as a ghost.

Then it was a whole thing. The bear wanted to tag along. She followed us everywhere we went, past the sneaker shop, the underwear store, the jewelry kiosk. Everyone wanted a selfie with the bear from a safe but visible distance. We would never find our lost dog with this bear in tow. The bear would scare her, or the people would, along with every other dog in the vicinity.

This theory proved to be wrong, though. We did find a dog, almost immediately. It was not our lost dog, but a dog with nary a care for bears in her midst. She seemed to believe every living creature loved her, and it appeared she was mostly correct. The cameras flashed. The living, the dead, the animal kingdom, any being with an arm reached out to stroke her. We loved her too and let her follow us out the exit and down the path back to the wall. It was covered with animal shadows now. Teeming.

Despite the new cutouts, we found the photo of our missing dog right away. The new dog stared and stared at it, as transfixed as me and my partner, my dead grandmother, and the bear. My collaging friend and my angry friend were also rapt. When the new dog started scratching at the wall with the full force of her nails, we all took part. We scratched and scratched from the depths of our guts until we scratched the pictures straight off and then we scratched the crumbling brick beneath until small pieces and then big pieces fragmented bit by bit and fell and the whole thing, we saw, was only sand. Now it was beneath our feet and so we walked on it, begging.