Winner of the 2024 Contest in Prose. Read judge Jamil Jan Kochai’s blurb here.
Kennel Training
When we first bring him home from the cryonics center, his clothes are still wet. He drips a trail of water over the welcome mat and does not take off his shoes. He forgoes his kennel and sits in the center of the couch, and a puddle fattens immediately around his legs. Mother offers him all the towels in the house, starting with a giant red one, and he shakes his head at each, even the one with tulips printed along the edges. Finally, she gets fed up, hands us each a blowdryer, and motions for us to surround him with weapons raised. On her cue, we fire. And he howls, like a dog. Like the wind.
The neighbors like to give theirs names—Jonahs and Rebeccas and Michaels and Marys. We call ours a good boy when he isn’t howling, a nuisance when he is. Mostly, we call him our frozen man. Mother tries out different names for the first few days, like Luke and Paul and John, but none of us take to them. Eventually she gives up.
Our frozen man doesn’t know how to use the T.V. until we teach him. He whimpers when he sees us lying on the living room floor with T.V. goggles strapped on, bellies up and eyes focused on the lenses. We ignore him until the movie is over, then sit up and ask him what’s wrong. He speaks for the first time and it’s guttural: I thought you died.
I laugh because it’s a ridiculous idea, us being dead, and he laughs because we’re laughing. It doesn’t sound like a laugh at first, more a rusty cough, like that part of his throat isn’t done thawing yet. It’s the first time he’s laughed in a hundred years, maybe, and it surprises us so much we say good boy good boy good boy until our stomachs ache too much to keep talking and then some. Good boy good boy good boy.
He loves the T.V. once he learns to use it. He never howls when watching and keeps his goggles on for so long that they indent thin ovals into his skin, overlapping and bisecting his fanned out crow’s feet, and he lies so still it’s like he’s been frozen again. His favorite shows are sitcoms, especially the really old ones. Sometimes, I join him to watch I Love Lucy or The Dick Van Dyke Show even though I don’t get half the jokes and have to take cues from him for when to laugh. He laughs often and uproariously, but his body remains unmoving the entire time.
“I wish we had T.V. in the cryostats,” he says during an ad break.
“That’s silly,” I say. He squirms in place. “You were dead.”
I’m curious about the chambers, about the cold and the deadness, if he could still do things like think about wiggling his toes even if he couldn’t wiggle his toes, but he’s fidgeting in that uncomfortable way so I don’t ask. He gets messy when he’s agitated, and Mother always makes me clean up after him because I’m the one who wanted him in the first place, as though we didn’t all agree. He listens to her best anyway, but I guess that’s because she has the strictest voice. She likes him even though she pretends not to. Sometimes when we come home from school, we find her tearing the kitchen apart trying to cook a meal he’s used to, something from a century ago that’s pricier and more time-consuming, something that glazes our counters with runny creams and goopy sauces. That’s just how Mother is with what she loves. She keeps a short leash but the best treats are by her side.
At first, he’s reticent about going outside. When we strap his harness around his shoulders and clip his leash to his back, he acts like he’s forgotten how to walk. Oafishly, he takes small, shuffling steps, but the longer we walk the gutsier he gets. He strains against his leash with more strength than I thought he had. He buries his hands into every prickly shrub. He plucks crabapples from drooping branches and tosses them into the street. He rips leaves from trees and crumples them then smooths them out and crumples them again. He tugs forward. He tugs sideways. He strains and strains and strains and I just run behind him trying to keep up. He chases a bird and then a squirrel and then stops to touch the wilting petals of a neighbor’s tulip with the gentlest hand.
I let him off-leash at the fenced-in center of the park, where he smothers himself in grass for twenty minutes. He moves constantly, itchily. He rolls from side to side and from head to toe, curled up like a potato bug. When he’s finally done, he trots over to the tree that I’m perched in the lowest branches of and grabs at the daisy chain in my hands.
“Hey,” I say, “Bad. Mine. Not yours.”
“You’re doing it wrong,” he says, tugging at it hard so I have to let go or risk it snapping.
“Mine,” I repeat, even though I’ve let him have it.
“Here,” he says. His hands have gone gentle again. “You don’t have to make slits in the stem. That’s just messy.” He unthreads the slitted stems and instead starts looping them around one another, each securing the previous in a deft knot. When he’s woven all of them together, he ties the first daisy to the last and turns the chain into a crown. “See? Isn’t that sturdier?”
“Good boy,” I say, placing it on my head. He’s right; it is sturdier.
He cares less and less for the T.V. the longer he stays with us. He prefers peering out the windows, rotating through the rooms like a security guard. Sometimes when we’re watching a show together, he jolts upright at random, shedding the goggles, and scrambles for the nearest window. Even when there’s nothing outside, he jams himself up against the glass and follows the clouds. He becomes uncoaxable when he’s by the windows, and we just finish the episode without him.
After a few months, he learns how to unlock his kennel from the inside. Sometimes we wake up to bad piano music, lively gavottes turned sad and sluggish, or to the smell of toast burning in the kitchen. Mother makes us lock our bedroom doors even though he never comes upstairs. She takes to hiding the toaster in different cupboards every night, and it becomes a game between the two of them. She tolerates his adventures otherwise, even puts out new piano music for him to learn. They play the game for weeks. He gets better at piano and she gets better at hiding the toaster. Some mornings when we sleep in, we don’t have time to find it and have to eat our bread cold and limp. They play unendingly. They play competitively. They play until we wake up one morning to silence and no smoke and the front door wide open.
He isn’t hard to find outside. We split up in different directions, and it takes only a few minutes for me to spot him climbing our far neighbor’s tree. His arms are hooked clumsily over the skinny branches, pine needles jabbing into his face.
“Down!” I shout, “Down, boy!”
He falls as soon as he hears my voice. He’s not so high up that anything breaks when he lands, but there’s still a fat thud when his back hits the mulch. When I peer down at him, he looks back up at me with frenzied eyes.
“I used to live here,” he howls, “I used to live here when the walls were blue and there were fewer flowers in the yard.”
“No,” I say, helping him up and pointing at our house. “You live there.”
He squirms but lets me drag him home as he rambles. “There were chipmunks every morning. I’d always find the tunnels they dug. Sometimes I poured water in them just to see what would happen.” He squints at me. “I was young, younger than you. I ate the grass sometimes, and I used to think if I climbed high enough in the trees I’d find berries nestled between the leaves.”
Mother crumples in relief when I lead him back inside, not even angry with him. As soon as he’s through the front door she grabs him and holds him. I can tell she’s given up pretending not to like him from the way she ruffles his hair, scratching the back of his neck.
“Don’t do that ever again,” she says, gathering her sternness back up around her.
“I remember,” he yips back, “I remember the flowers we grew. They were wide and flat-faced, brown in the center but with yellow petals. Sunflowers, maybe.” We herd him back to his kennel and he gets in all by himself, the kennel tag jingling against the door as it closes him in. On one side it still says Abraham but I’ve written Our Frozen Man on the other. “They were my mother’s favorite. They must’ve been sunflowers, but the smaller ones.”
He’s still going when we all leave for school and just waves back hastily when we wave goodbye, doesn’t even beg to come with us or ask when we’ll return. We still do our due diligence and reassure him yes we’ll be back soon no you can’t come with us. I’m the last out the door and before I go, Mother pulls me aside to ask me to buy a better lock.
“I have work later,” she says, “so this will be your job, okay?”
After school, I let our frozen man, no longer babbling, out from his kennel and leash him. He stares restlessly at the passing cars as we walk, his head swiveling like a lighthouse. I grip his leash tighter, momentarily worried he’s about to give chase, but all he does is watch and sometimes wave. I stop by the hardware store on the way to the park and purchase a heavy padlock with complicated gears running down its side, leaving our frozen man tied to a post at the front while I pick it out.
At the park, we sit in the grass, and he helps me with my math homework. He’s good with numbers; sometimes, when we have guests over, we let him coax the answers out of long strings of equations as a party trick.
“I remember learning this,” he says in the middle of drawing a graph. “I’ve always remembered how to do it, but now I remember when I learned it. I didn’t realize I forgot so much.”
I copy the points he’s plotted onto my assignment. “Good boy,” I say, “Can you do number three next?”
“My math teacher’s name was Johnson.” His pencil sketches out the answer to number three. “I liked the class, but the girl next to me hated it. Her name was Tracy, and I pretended to hate it too, so we’d have something to talk about. I was young enough that I thought I might marry her someday, just because we complained about homework together.” He drops his pencil abruptly. “Do you like school?”
“Sometimes,” I say, handing the pencil back to him. When I finish copying his work, I stand up and scratch behind his ears. “Good boy. Stand. Good boy.”
Mother snaps the new padlock onto the door of his kennel as soon as I get home. She squats beside it while the rest of us eat dinner and twists the gears into formation, tugging on it to check its sturdiness. She only joins us once she’s satisfied with the code she’s set, some mess of digits that blurs my vision. For dessert, she brings out a wide ring of peach jello, yellow and pink. In thin red icing, the words Happy 6 Months arc around the edge of the plate.
“Happy six months!” We all cheer, and our frozen man eyes the jello hungrily, jaw hanging wide and tongue lolling to the side. Mother cuts him the first slice and lets him eat it at the table with the rest of us. The jello is cold and wet but sweet enough to make up for it, and we finish it quickly.
“Thank you,” says our frozen man, staring down at his clean plate. “I appreciate it, I really do.”
“Good boy good boy good boy,” we chorus back, and he cocks his head at us.
It’s my turn to lock him in for the night and turn off all the downstairs lights, but because it’s his six-month anniversary of being with us, we all do it together.
“Good night, our frozen man,” each of us says, taking turns tugging on the padlock.
“Good night,” he barks back each time. “Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night.”
No one else wants to turn off all the lights, so I’m the last one up the stairs. He says good night to me loudest of all.
“Good night,” I whisper back, flicking the final light switch. And, because I can’t help it, “Good boy. Good boy. Good boy.” I skip every other step as I head up, leaving him with only the nightlight on. In my room, I double-check each sheet of homework before I tuck it into my backpack. I carefully peel the stickers from graded assignments I’ve been handed back and press them onto the front of my folder, where clumps of A+! Rock Star! Superb! have amassed. Last month, my teacher gave me the Most Improved In Math certificate. I gave it to our frozen man, and he keeps it under his bed like a treasure or a tooth.
I dream that my teacher puts a textbook in front of me. When I open it, the pages are all piecewise and half-blank. Everything that isn’t blank is blurry. I look up. My entire class sits in front of me, staring. I’m the only one taking the test. My teacher asks me to fill in the blanks and explain my work out loud. I try to tell him I can’t read any of the words or numbers but when I open my mouth my teeth fall out, clattering to the floor. Everyone laughs, and my gummy mouth can’t form words. I sit there quietly. My classmates start throwing my teeth at me.
In the morning, my mouth aches. I don’t want breakfast, but the toaster, unmoved from its hiding spot in the hollow of the piano, pops out perfect golden slices from between steel strings as soon as I step downstairs. The front door is unlocked but still closed, and our frozen man is gone.