The Dancing Skinny

IT RAINED EVERY DAY FOR THREE MONTHS, from late fall till spring. I’m sure a weak sun came out once or twice but never long enough to get used to. Mostly it was dank and cold, and the sky was low, like the ceiling of a coal mine, the clouds the color of asphalt. By March the low places ran with muddy water and washed whole lifetimes away, and storms tore up some parts of the South like they were held together with shoeboxes and glue. Things rusted that never had, doors swelled and jammed, and roots of hundred-year-old trees lost their grip in the liquid soil and fell under their own weight. It even caused a kind of moldering in the mind, an absence of optimism, like we had tracked the red mud into our finer nature. I have often heard old people in Alabama pray for rain, but never so hard against it. My mother began to see it as a sign, and it did seem odd, as the weeks slogged by. The weatherman offered no hope, night after night; he might as well have been a cardboard cutout with a fixed, final forecast, and the rains fell, till the end of the world. ¶ Or it might be it all just seemed that way, on the day a good dog died.

The people who discarded her, who threw her away, called her something else, but we never knew that name. We called her Skinny, because she was two dogs high and half a dog wide. She was so lean, so long-legged and light, she seemed to glide without effort or even the pull of gravity when she flashed through the pines and the rocky places up high, running down a deer or just some distant sound, and she would sprint across a mountain to make sure a scent on the breeze presented no threat to her people, her porch, her place. She was