The bombs stopped years ago but still our faith and animals are slow to return. All except the cats: black, Dalmatian, orange and brown tabbies haunt every crevice. They wait in corners of the Old Town in Mostar, in Bosnia, to trounce strangers and encourage a stroke or a food donation. Kittens bunker below bullet holed ruins and old apartment windows, where scraps might be tossed out. The eldest cats claim territory, like the back of the Konzum Grocery’s garbage bins, where bounty arrives at rhythms the elder cats can rely on. A perverse form of sharing and stealing, swiping and fighting has emerged.
You might never catch sight of a dog roaming the city, not like the cats. Very few were coddled or allowed to stay domestic. Mostly, there are a lot of lonely doghouses.
If asked, What’s left behind after a war: still spawning cats. Mange. Hunger. The cats are hushed, until they see you take to a bench with an offering. Before they eat lukewarm leftovers—what you regard as trash—they indulge in your caress. It is like these cats have only memories of their domestication and are not, in fact, descendants of an abandoned generation.
Farther south in the valley, there are fewer animals of any kind though occasionally one might spot a ratty, lonesome terrier swimming upstream in green waters, following packs of ducks.
The terrier has learned to stick to the river for food. Months before, taller, leaner dogs ripped apart his companion, leaving not even sinews. The terrier sprints for the ice cold Neretva sweeping him into her flow until his limbs become warm in their stiffness, ready to surrender. He paddles to a new stretch of river and sleeps in two-minute bursts. Not a cat or dog surrounds. Only the confident ducks in the water.
When the shelling came, he lost all allegiance. The doors swung open; the collars came off. Dogs followed the bends and flows of the river. The terrier’s birthplace is less relevant than where he chooses to die.
One of the tabbies left her kittens by the Lucki Most, the first bridge shelled and now rebuilt. The hopes of our city could be counted, just after the shelling stopped, in car traffic—before it resumed its rightful place as our collective grievance, something we could share. The tabby would use the bridge to prowl between the east and west banks, taking stock of the city and, on occasion, the kittens.
Boys later dangle then catch, dangle then catch one of her kittens from the bridge. They raced home to beg their mother to let them keep it. The tabby took off for the park on Zrinjevac, confident their begging would wind up like all the others.
The terrier improves his swimming speed. He gets used to the cold pricks rippling up his legs to his throat and ears, which he fights hard to keep above water. Through the splashes he can see the ducks’ figures. Memory of smell and direction are still distorted since the bombs. He’s paddled as far as he can stand before letting the river’s natural current return him to the banks.
The ducks cackle. They swim on, oblivious, pleased. They’re unburdened by the hunger of the dog.
*
Off the bank by where the Old Bridge once stood, people swore they saw a hen floating, breast upright, her lungs expanded, swerving with each twist of the current. Some observers add sound effects until it’s not clear anymore which part is fiction and which is by-the-book fact.
School lets out so kids run down to the banks. They barely remember the gape over the river is new. They have to be told and shown pictures, like it’s folklore: this bridge always a weak, nearly invisible string now only able to carry one of us at a time, since it was shelled. Kids now laugh and eat chips from crinkling bags they leave behind. In time, the older ones will use the banks as a location to caress each other. The younger ones will toss a pebble in, make a wish, and dare each other to tiptoe in, a playful shove testing the balance of friend after friend.
A trio greets them: a brown duck, a classic green-headed mallard, and a strange Dalmatian colored fowl. The duck and mallard’s beaks are bent together, in cahoots, the Dalmatian paddling in the V of ripples in their aftermath. The trio returns year after year, in their own form or in that of their descendants. Our kids can never tell which; they are gone, in search of work that seems only to exist elsewhere, before any noticeable difference appears, and the ducks hold the only living memory.
The terrier is getting weak. Desperation hasn’t sped up the acquisition of a skill—fishing—he never possessed.
The river is no longer his liberator but a mocking vortex whose rapids pound in his ears. The fleas have left him. For a dog and the valley, that signals winter.
There are fewer ducks but you wouldn’t know it from the squawks drifting by the river, past him. He’s taken to chewing at his front right leg. Madness—a reflection of what was or genes showing themselves—snap trains of thought in his mind. He’s raced just to the banks of the river and back. To the banks and back. To the banks —
Farther north, cats cling to Mostar. Whether this is because they trust edifices more than nature, the ratty terrier doesn’t know. All the dog can ever know is what’s there in the radius of his gnawed leg and a pounding river, with a faint hint of sinews torn.
The ducks draw closer and closer, their selection of quacks twitching in their throat, like the song their ancestors never got to finish.
I can’t even begin to say what happened to the turkeys and pigeons. All I know is that, for awhile, nobody flew.
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N.T. Arévalo's stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Necessary Fiction, The Boiler Journal, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Regarding Arts & Letters, Eunoia
Review, and Eclectica, and received Honorable Mention in the 2014 Bevel Summers Prize Contest. Learn more at arevalossketches.com.