An Apology to Marissas

Lynn could feel her feet pounding the ground. Her chest was burning, and her ankles were about to snap. Sweat poured down her face, gathering under her shirt and nose. Breathing heavily, she hoarsely cried out, “Come here, come here.”

The dog kept running, the brown thing with short fur and a mismatched mouth. Lynn had been chasing after it for at least fifteen minutes, she assumed. Each breath that she threw out into the air was costing her more energy than she used to do ten pushups. She had been in martial arts training for an hour, going up and down the floor endlessly for at least thirty minutes, kicking at absolutely nothing. She was exhausted, and the mutt running like it was in dog-heaven wasn’t helping at all. She cursed colorfully as she set her eyes on the sign that red, Deerpark. Gritting her teeth, she picked up her pace and it brought an inferno into her lungs.

“I don’t know this place, so stop,” she huffed to herself and the dog, muttering a few cuss words of choice after. “I’ve never been to Deerpark, damn it!”

It all began with her love for animals, Lynn assumed. It always did. ‘It’s unhealthy,’ many friends had told her. ‘You love them but they don’t love you.’

Well, squirrels did bite. Cats also had amazingly sharp claws.

Aside from the countless squirrels that she had approached, the racing dog that was lingering ahead of her was an entirely different business. And Lynn had to admit, it was her fault that she took time and care to pet and love every single dog that she came across in the neighborhood, unleashed or not.

Before she had begun to chase after the damned beast, she had been running peacefully just fine, damn it. It was a routine run that she took once every few days around her quiet neighborhood. Then she turned a corner and saw that the house directly to her right had the dog unleashed - the brown demon from hell that happened to be so damn cute and heart-aching. Many people didn’t get her over-attachment to animals, or how she treated every dog like she had lived with it for decades. It was simply in her nature, she could only say. Dog was family, family was dog.

She stopped in front of the brown dog, and later she knew that the thing’s name was Dolly, or something similar to that. Dolly had seemed to like her, wagging its tail and panting furiously in joy. She stopped for a couple minutes to pet it, causing it to show its belly on the ground and it was laughing so beautifully, and Lynn guessed that she had been a slave of the dog for a while.

Then she got up and ran again. Behind her, she had been able to hear the clicking of dog claws against the pavement. And for a moment she was excited, because she loved dogs and most dogs loved her - or they thought she was completely insane for shoving her hand in front of their fangs. Either way. Dolly was following her and she was fine with it, because usually unleashed dogs had their own territory that they didn’t step out of.

She was wrong, so damned wrong.

After a while, it began to run close to her —she noted that it was running funny, stiffly, like it had sticks attached to its legs or something— and then when she slowed down, Dolly had begun to race in front of her.

Soon, with horror that the thing was still following her, Lynn realized that the dog could go just about anywhere, and it could be lost, and it would be all her fault, damn it, and she knew that she had to chase it.

Damn it.

And so the chase in the present moment was put on.

“Stop! Good boy, girl… Whatever!” she cried desperately. Now she really had no idea where she was going, and she swore out loud in rage. The love for the mutt was beginning to fade, and now she was beginning to think about just going back, then the love took over again.

It was getting harder to breathe. Usually, she didn’t try to make herself feel like a wimpy twig with a very poor lung capacity. Yet she just couldn’t bear to stand witness to a dog being lost. It made her heart twist with just thinking of the thing wandering around in the neighborhood all by itself then being run over by a truck or something.

She kept running.

Sometimes Dolly stopped and every time, Lynn made a grab for it. If she had been able to catch it when it was sniffing at the grass, she would have reduced her time of running by at least ten minutes.

Four words. The thing was strong.

With incredible strength, the dog twisted away from Lynn’s grasp every time she grabbed its thick torso. And the fact that it was still laughing and panting infuriated her. She let out a small, hoarse cry and continued chasing the thing.

It wasn’t until when Dolly saw another dog that Lynn managed to latch onto it. Breathing heavily, she cursed herself, cursed her head, cursed her lungs, cursed her ankles. Then she opened her mouth, feeling that it was incredibly and painfully dry. She stared up blankly at three old ladies that sat on a house’s porch with a short-legged dog. The name escaped her in the moment. You retard.

“Uh, this isn’t my dog,” she began.

That was lame, you retard.

She internally narrowed her eyes at herself. Shut up, stop using my ideas. Then she managed to force a smile onto her face, somehow. “I’m trying to get it back to where it’s… living. I’ve chased it for the last fifteen minutes, so…” She settled with laughing and tried to make herself sound like she actually knew what she was doing. “So yeah.”

Then she put her hands on her knees and focused on breathing.

An old lady said something about removing her dog, or herself, Lynn wasn’t sure. Still panting lightly, Lynn nodded in desperation and clenched her arms around Dolly’s chest. It was still growling at the short-legged dog that the ladies held. “Thank you, ma’am, thank you… I’ll try to, uh…” She tried to hide her very retarded loss of words with heavy pants.

“Do you need a leash?” a voice yelled to her left. Lynn tightened her grip on the damned dog and whipped her head to the voice. It was an old man, and he looked very concerned at the sweaty girl, breathing like she had asthma, attempting desperately to hold on to a dog that was one fourth of her size.

“Yes!” Lynn gasped out. Savior, Jesus the savior, I’ll start going to church now. “Yes, sir, please! Thank you!”

The old man walked quickly back into his house and Lynn waited, the heaving of her entire body slowly beginning to cease. Dolly was panting, and she fought back the urge to smack its head like a punching bag.

Soon, the man hobbled over to Lynn with a pink leash in his hands. It was just a fancy pink rope, really, but the man tied it into a noose and put it around Dolly’s neck. “That should do,” the old man grinned. “I used to take dogs into my garage like that, kept them until their owners came around looking for them. They'd insulting me by paying me.”

A flash of connection sparked to life inside Lynn’s mind. A fellow dog lover. “Thank you so much, sir,” she said, stumbling over her words. “I’ll be back in, uh, five, ten minutes. I promise. Thank you, sir.”

The old man only smiled, and Lynn imagined that it was in pity. ‘Who set that crazy girl free in the streets?’ he must have been thinking. “Take your time,” he said, and climbed the steps onto his porch.

Lynn dragged the damned dog back to its house, somehow managing to run half the time. There was a happiness that hadn’t been there before, a glee that the owner would be able to unite with his or her dog. Damned love for wild animals and unleashed dogs.

And soon enough she stood in front of the door of the house that Dolly lived in. Lynn took a glance at the abandoned basketball and a green bicycle that lay dirty against one side of the house, then knocked against the door.

From the window to her right came a loud cussing of a man, involving ‘mother’ and ‘how did that bird get on there’, making her raise an eyebrow. She waited, holding Dolly, then the door opened.

The guy was shirtless, she thought. She blinked, lost herself, then regained it.

He seemed to be in his mid-twenties, with only a loose jeans hanging by his waist. There were greenish-blue tattoos all over his bare torso, and his eyes were half-lidded and blue.

Lynn managed a smile, although now she had no idea what her face looked like. She loved her ability to stay calm even until she got killed like a brainless fly. “Hello, sir. Uh, I found your dog, it was following me…” All words escaped her as they usually did. She settled into a hesitant silence, and she straightened her back to stare into the man’s blurry eyes.

“Oh my god,” the man said suddenly. “Thank you so much… Dolly, where the hell have you been…” He reached for the dog, and Lynn quickly untied the pink leash around the dog’s neck. She quietly thought that there was something wrong with how the man was speaking. Her head was spinning, turning blank, spinning, turning blank. There was nothing like ‘self-defense mechanisms kicking in’ like it said in books. Well, there was something vaguely similar to that — kick, kick, kick, in the neck, in the face, in the shin, somewhere, somewhere, was what Lynn thought. But the words were scattered and covered with a thick fog, and she was paying too much attention to what her eyes saw, and the leash was cold in her hand.

She was in a crappy situation. Breathing faintly, she forced herself to realize that she could dunk this guy into a crappier one if she really wanted to. If she really could stop staring and blanking out.

“Oh, thank you so much…” the man continued, his eyes still unfocused. “I should give you a reward, money… Yeah, I really should…”

Lynn grinned stiffly. “No, I’m fine, sir. I didn’t expect any rewards.”

“Mhm,” the man nodded. And Lynn thought that his eyes got sharper when he spoke next, “What’s your name? I’d like to know, I want to thank you.”

“Oh,” Lynn laughed. Up until the moment, she had never realized how blank she really was. Maybe she really had to start thinking quickly, not always walking around like a groggy cow. “Marissa,” she blurted out, suddenly understanding for the first time the common phrase, ‘the first thing that popped into her mind’.

“Marissa?” the man repeated. “Do you live here?”

“Nah,” Lynn laughed back. Not normal, not normal, her mind was blaring. Disable him? Run away? No, the dog. Eyes watching. “I’m here to visit… a friend.”

She suddenly recalled her friends telling her that she was terrible at acting. Well, there was no time to improvise, and she just hoped that it didn’t show.

“Do you live in Cincinnati?” the man continued to shoot forth a question. He was leaning against the doorframe.

“Yeah.”

“Where in Cincinnati?” Lynn felt like a stupid doll. Blanking out, swirling in confusion as to what was happening to her. Dolly was by her legs, she realized, and instantly she was comforted.

Then she realized that she had been asked a question, and it was a bad one, not for him but for her. She didn’t even know her own phone number or address, or her ZIP code, or… or… anything.

“Hamilton,” she managed. It was one of the only places that she knew.

“Oh, Hamilton, I’ve got a few buddies living up there.”

“That’s great!” Lynn laughed painfully. The sweat on her forehead and nose felt cold all of a sudden. Oh, shit, what have I gotten myself into. Kick him? Get away?

“So, you go around colleges? That’s what you do?”

Lynn shook her head lightly.

“High school,” she replied. It was easy for her, for many people often mistook her for a college or high school student.

“Oh, alright!” the man smiled. His eyes were something that made Lynn want to back away from him or punch him square in his face, hard, so hard that she would be forever banned from her martial arts school. Then she would run away. She was swimming in a load of crap. “So what was your name again?”

“Marissa.” This time it sounded much smoother. “I need to go now, if you don’t mind…” She turned stiffly and smiled again.

“Alright, alright. Dolly, go in, yeah, into the house…”

Lynn didn’t stay long enough to watch the dog scurry back into the house, although when she glanced back, only the man was staring at her. She hurried in her footsteps, then slowly began to worry for the dog. What if, what if, what if. What if he hits the dog, what if… He seemed like a drug addict, so what if…

She began to run again.

The burning in her chest helped her focus, although she failed to think of anything at all while her feet beat painfully against the hard pavements. Only after returning the leash to the old man, then running back out of Deerpark, could she slow down into a walk.

Retard, retard, retard retard retard.

Lynn gritted her teeth sharply and formed her hands into fists. Shut it.

From a distance, a man and a dog were approaching. It seemed like a completely different man from who Lynn had talked to only a moment before, and she instantly smiled.

Then she was near enough to see his face. His arms. He was Dolly’s owner and Dolly was by his side.

Unthinking, Lynn reached out and petted Dolly’s head. The dog’s laughter made her heart squeeze, and she realized that her love for animals would kill her some day.

“Thank you so much again,” the man said.

Lynn laughed. “Any time.”

As the man and Dolly passed by, Lynn smelled cigarette smoke on him, and she blinked slowly.

There was a slow, creeping fear that climbed onto her neck and wrapped around it. She cursed under her breath, frowning deeply. She forced herself to continue walking forward. She was a black belt, she was strong, she could beat the guy up any time, or she hoped, she…

The air was suffocating her, not too cold or warm. It seemed as if it were about to rain, and for the first time in her life, Lynn shivered out of fear.