The Cheese Sandwich is a rough draft experimenting in linking the evocative properties of food experience with psychology. This is part two. Let me know what you think.
Unsteady, as one possessed but purposeful, she got into her car, wiped the steering wheel with an antiseptic toilette, set her GPS and drove to The Humane Society mostly on automatic and when her GPS flew a little black and white flag she knew she had arrived.
The Humane Society was in a new building: window and steel, large parking lot, it looked more likely to house high tech workers than animals. Already she liked it. She opened the visibly clean glass door and saw a linoleum floor reflecting the light of overhead fluorescents. The walls were staged with posters of endearing animals with printed instructions on how to treat them well.
A receptionist behind a neutral gray laminate counter was young, well dressed and looked like she should have been in marketing or at the least a minor executive at R.E.I. – she didn’t appear to have enough cynicism for law or separateness for medicine. No matter. Her job was to explain how the facility worked. She stated, “Here at the Humane Society we’re divided into three main compartments: cats, small animals, dogs. Are you interested in any one in particular? Dogs? Okay, the dog section is divided into four pods, each named after a color, green, red, yellow or blue and the dogs are roughly divided into size and breed. Look at them all you want. If you see one you want to meet bring the card above its kennel back to the front desk and a volunteer will get the dog for you.”
Good, here was a system.
She entered the yellow pod and the metal door closed quietly, and definitively behind her. Once past she became aware she was the alone in the pod. She was Alice and she’d passed through the rabbit hole. She was Dorothy through the eye of the hurricane. She was a Persephone at the heart of the dog pound. Memory merges with fear, is molded, strained and reset by the matrix of our previous impressions. She started through the maize like Thesies at Crete without a string.
She took eight or nine steps and realized the cement floor was oddly uneven, slanting first left, then right but with no rhythm and unrelated to the left, right of her footsteps. Startled, she squinted at the undulating hallway, narrowing and widening. Her first thought was that she was ill – some sort of inner ear infection. She took her pulse, checking it against the digital read-out of her watch. No, fine. She put her wrist against her forehead. Not hot. She was fine.
Somewhere there was the bark and growl of dogs but it was thin and distant. There were no bars or rails to steady herself, to grasp and re-group. Deep breath. This was the Humane Society for Christmas-morning-as-ordinary as-underwear’s-sake. Deep breath, let it out easy and long. The smell of animal, anima, carnival, carnivore. She was slipping. She sat on the floor – hard. Terra firma. Firmly, here.
She was eyeball to eyeball with a small grayish something between a carin terrier and something else with a severe overbite. Dentist. Dennis. Toto-through-the-looking-glass had a reproachful look but Dennis had liked her. She had been critical of his appearance, lifestyle, the way he flossed his teeth, and the wrong color white of his socks. She held out her hand against the cage but not through it. Equally tentatively the dog came closer, it’s tongue escaping where a tooth or two were missing, it put it’s nose against her hand but didn’t lick it. She felt the cool moistness. Deep breath, deep, deep breath. She was going to die in the Humane Society from dog germs, for antiseptic-blessed-cleaner’s sake. Well, okay, she probably wouldn’t. There were toilettes in the car.
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