Crutches

Tokyo shits violently and without warning—a smudgy, lime-green ricochet right onto my eyebrows. He’s nothing like B. It makes me miss everything about B.

B was my oldest, earliest friend, all the way until this summer when she went insane over her mother’s phalloplasty. Her mother was becoming a man, and B, in a sort of defiant oblivion, refused to talk about it. Instead, she quit law school. She started getting lasered and leeched every day of the week, emerging more exquisite and girlish and irritating each time. B wouldn’t openly admit her unhappiness—wouldn’t let me drink it like a tonic for mine—so I kept pressing little heart emojis to her manic texts about collagen trials and black-market injectables, awaiting, longing for, a confession that wouldn’t come. Finally, I had to admit our friendship had reached something of a natural expiry. It was up to me to end it.

At the animal shelter I said, Give me the worst dog available, which turned out to be an oafish, fecal-brown Vizsla missing a back leg. But of course B doted on him. She found endless excuses to come over. She took a hundred pictures of Tokyo expelling sludge in the yard, balanced on his three legs, prism-like.

Then there was the day he went missing and I drove all over town crying his name. I had a hunch. Following it, I found him at B’s house, where she pretended he’d wandered away on his own. The third time this happened, I confronted her and she said, Your problem is that you are so fucking clingy, Alyssa.

It was obvious what was happening: B, shrewd as she was, had sensed me pulling away and decided to take proactive revenge by pretending to care more for my new dog than for me. So I said, Fine, why don’t you just keep him! And she called my bluff: OK! So Tokyo became her dog. B stopped texting me. I had never been so alone.

From B’s new father, I got the name and number of the top-rated surgeon in Burbank. It cost all my savings. But when I woke up on the table, I was stunning. They’d done immaculate work. Cherub eyes, such power in the haunches, my double coat far shinier than Tokyo’s, plus the extra leg.

Slotting into B’s life was easy. All I had to do was whine a bit in the grass outside where she liked to get pear smoothies after her cleavage-smoothing Botox shots, and she crouched and said Oh, ohohoh my poor darling. When she took me home, I braced myself to compete with Tokyo for B’s affections.

But it turned out B didn’t care for either of us. Both of us were often left starving—pissing our own beds—and B would go days without feeding us or letting us out. Gradually, she stopped going out herself. She put herself horizontal on the sofa and did not get up, no matter how much we scratched at her. One day her phone rang, and she lunged toward it and inhaled in a burst and then she said, Oh, it’s not Alyssa, and started to cry. I’m Alyssa, I wanted to say. But she had given me a collar that said Marmalade. She went to the kitchen for something and fell asleep on the soapstone.

The smell of her body turned vile. I shouted and punched at her; she did not move. I shrieked as loud as I could to summon the neighbors, but my voice was puny. When someone finally came, Tokyo just watched, trying to swallow a sock.

Eventually, B got carried out in a child’s stretcher. I’m not sure why. Maybe the ambulance was out of adult stretchers, or there was a miscommunication. Her calves dangled down in the air like unmanned puppets. The medic hoisting the stretcher kept batting her bare swinging blue toes away from his groin, blushing like he was worried someone would think the wrong thing.

Tokyo’s constant diarrhea is likely refeeding syndrome, a reaction to too much food after too little of it, according to the animal-control people who brought us here. They tutted over how skinny he was. Well, we were both very skinny—but between the two of us, it was true that he looked worse, that his three-leggedness made him easier to pity and adore. The sign posted outside our kennel says it’s “ideal” for both dogs to be adopted together because one of us has separation anxiety, and I guess it’s nice of them not to specify which one. I’m not proud of the way I made a gash in my own stomach with my front teeth that one time a lady came and only wanted to see Tokyo, and they left me alone for an hour. Ideal is not strong enough a word. Even though Tokyo is the dumbest, most foul-smelling idiot in the world, I cannot lose him again. I live in quaking, angry fear that some selfish person will try to take him away from me. Love is not about anything but that.