Dog of Dogs

Dog ofDogs PAUL WITHERINGTON The woman coming from her desk stared at him hard enough to leave holes in the back of his head. From that angle he seemed decent, but he was the sort who never cared about things and had to be introduced to them again and again. After he had returned the third magazine to the slanting shelf she leaned across the table. "Young man. Young man, please read the sign." There were times when a rule had to be a rule, she wanted to tell him, and then she saw the bowl cut hair and the faded dark sport coat that hung like a shower curtain. Thank God we've got this place for them, she thought. Clean, well stocked, orderly. She had a sudden impulse to walk around the table and touch him on the sleeve, but instead of responding to her smile he had dropped the next magazine onto the table face down. In a large glass window behind the row of reading tables she saw the young girl's feet on a chair and she went that way first, circling to reach her from behind. Even the tops of the bare feet were dirty and the long jeans had faded into chalk. She bent as close as she could and hissed her "please," looking up at the boy several chairs away who had pulled another magazine from the rack, glanced at its backside, and dropped it on the table as if he were now going to undo all his sins and everyone else's too. "Someone has to sit there," the woman said patiently, and the girl drew her legs back slowly, as if from primeval glue. If I had my way, the woman from Periodicals said to herself as she travelled back the maze of chairs left in aisles, pushing most of them Paul Witherington's stories have recently appeared, or will soon appear, in Mississippi Review, Wascana Review, and Kansas Quarterly. He teaches at South Dakota State University. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW41 back in place, they'd at least be dressed. But when she had reached her desk and shuddered into her chair she caught the eye of a drab elderly woman reading Time magazine, smiled at her and extended her smile in an arc that included a bald man with his head wrapped in a newspaper like the fat dip of an ice cream cone and the man with a grey plaid jacket who sat at the Reference desk at the far end of the room trying not to see. "Bless their hearts," she said under her breath. "It's not them, it's us, all of us." The boy stood over the chair where the girl was sitting with her toes bent under at the floor and facing a far corner of the library where two children were standing in front of a small glassed-in room. "You're not reading," he said. She looked up and then down, and her lips moved as if she were forming the words on the page, but this page had no ordinary words. It was an advertisement for shampoo. A girl with long golden hair was coming out of a pool of still water surrounded by bright purple and yellow and green tropical plants. Two white doves were putting a wreath over her head while she stared at a bottle floating on a surface that offered no reflection. "You're not reading, I don't care what your mouth does. So don't get any ideas about me. What that old dragon told you, I'm telling you something else." "Buzz off," the girl said without looking up, and she turned to the next page, planting a speckled fingernail over the letters in the upper left corner to show where she was. Her long black hair was tangled and smelled of boxes stored in basements. In front of her, on the table, there was a name which had been marked through and after it the words DOG OF DOGS formed with almost square letters in the hard wood. It was the only carving on the table. "When I saw you, I thought you...