Generously sponsored by I-Regen at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Selected for publication by Stephanie Anderson
*
Correction: “Sundogs” is incorrectly attributed to Ashlen Renner in the print edition.
Meghan E. O’Toole is the author of “Sundogs” and the winner of the Regeneration Literary Contest.
Introduction
Through the lens of childhood, Meghan E. O’Toole’s story “Sundogs” captures the moment we are living: the ecological and societal destruction wrought by industrial food production is pervasive, and the window for embracing the promise of regenerative food systems that heal our land and rural communities is narrowing.
“Sundogs” speaks not only to that narrowing, but also to the hope that regeneration offers for the next generation. The story is a warning and a call to action, a layered narrative of our children’s reality and the restorative future we could give them instead, all delivered in poignant prose.
—Stephanie Anderson, guest judge
Sundogs
When Calico Daniels tells us the world is going to end, we believe her because life has been ending for as long as we can remember. Teachers tell us stories of fireflies. We try to impress flashing pinpricks of light upon the dark prairiescapes of home. The insects, like snow, are one of many things we never got to see.
Calico, perched atop the plastic yellow slide at recess with her braids haloing her face, said, “The world is going to end this summer,” and there was no arguing. There were no tears. There were only the quiet scoffs and bored eyes that go along with growing up in a world bounding headlong into extinction. I thought to myself, finally, and I was a little relieved, and everyone was about to ignore her when she said, “August twelfth, the sun won’t rise.”
But everyone knows that’s not how it ends. So there was some contention, a few kids who said “greenhouse gasses” and “wildfires” and “floods” until Daniel Rately stood up and called her a liar. The word was repeated on every mouth in school. Calico Daniels is a liar. And a weirdo and a freak and a loner.
After school when everyone was dumping the contents of their backpacks, Calico, flanked by her small pack of playground followers, stepped forward, tapped Dan on the shoulder, and said loud enough for everyone to hear: “You’re going to die this summer, Daniel. You’re going to drown in a swimming pool. They’ll find you floating face down wearing yellow shorts. No one will notice you’re gone until it’s too late to save you.”
Everyone within earshot stopped. This was no idle jeer. Dan stalked off muttering about how Calico was just crazy, but he burned any yellow shorts he had that night even though his mother scolded him for it, and he wouldn’t go near a pool even though this summer has been hotter than last summer, just like every year.
So, here is August eleventh in all its light-drenched succor, and no one but her cult buys her story about the sun. Her friends, Lundi Masterston and two dweeby fourth graders, think she can really see the future, and the rest of the school thinks she’s a joke. I think she smells like prairie grass, and when she first moved here I thought we could be friends, but I am not sure I believe her. Because endings happen slowly. Endings have been happening since we were born.
I’ve spent my whole summer watching food spoil. Today is no different. It has been remarkable how fast the fruits go bad this summer. Mom will bring something home, and within days, it’s inedible. The yellow bananas darken within hours. The strawberries pucker and tighten, their skins losing its juicy finish. The long pounding weeks of summer with no friends and nothing to do. Even Calico has a friend.
I am resting my chin against the cool granite countertop when Mom walks in with armfuls of groceries. “No more of that.” She has that pointy look that makes her makeup crimp. She picks up the bowl of strawberries and puts it in the fridge.
I sit up straight. “Mom.” She never understands my projects. I think I’ve been doing very important work watching the fruit go bad. It feels like science. By the time school starts, I will have learned something. “I’ve been watching them all day.”
Mom pauses just long enough to frown. “You’ve been sitting here doing nothing all day.” She unbuttons her skirt and takes a deep breath. “Go outside, Eugenie.”
I rub my chin where it stuck to the counter. “I wasn’t doing nothing.”
Mom suggests, stupidly, “See if the twins want to play.”
That makes my whole face disappear in color. Play? I’m not five. “We’re not friends anymore.”
“Go outside,” Mom says without asking why. “Be in the sun.”
I almost tell her about Calico’s prophecy, but I can picture the tired look of disdain so clearly. She hates everything I say these days. I wonder who else knows what it’s like to have parents who hate you. Not that I blame them. I pick myself up from the kitchen chair and trudge toward the summer heat. I was going to go outside anyway. I strap on my rollerblades. I have to clutch the railing as I climb down the front steps.
“Helmet,” Mom calls, but I make a point not to hear.
The rollerblades were a gift from Dad for my eleventh birthday, one thing of mine that never belonged to my sister, and so they are the only good thing I have. They fit better now than they did last summer. I spotted them at the secondhand shop and fell in love with the shiny purple gleam beyond the scuffs, and I begged Dad to get them. He did, and then Mom made him buy knee pads, too. I don’t wear those. Sometimes I think Mom doesn’t want me to have anything. When no one is home, I climb down from my attic bedroom—which is too hot in the summer—and open the door to my sister Teddy’s room. When I touch her things, I am careful to put them back just as I found them, curling the beaded necklaces back into their loops on top of the dresser and smoothing out the quilted bedcover after I sit on the bed. Teddy’s room is filled with so many nice things that Mom picked out, and I can’t remember the last time Mom bought me something other than clothes I would grow into, clothes I don’t even like.
I sit on the front step. The ugly drone of cicadas boils up around me. The sun cuts across the street at a sharp angle. I rock my rollerblades back and forth on the concrete and watch the wheels’ shadows bubble over the grooves and stones.
In summer, the earth bakes and lets out dead grassy smells and the faint waft of pesticides and fertilizers. In all the fields that surround town, the farmers fight the world and give all the water they can to corn. I read that 20 teragrams of soil are up in the atmosphere due to erosion. This feels sad to me. Where will we bury all the bodies when we run out of soil?
Down the street, a cloud of dust shrouds two figures as they approach my house—twins. Soon, I can hear the gravel crunch under their feet. They walk matching red bikes toward me. When they reach the front path, they stop.
Kip and Tad Murray, both wearing baseball hats, are usually not so quiet. Tad looks like he was crying, maybe.
They trade a glance. Kip says, “They just found Dan Rately in his neighbor’s pool.”
Tad says, “Dead.” He rocks back on his heels a little like he may lose his balance. “They said he got tangled in a garden hose and tripped and hit his head, so he fell in unconscious face down.”
“The chlorine bleached his brown shorts yellow,” Kip says.
The fine hairs on my arms lift. Danny Rately. Dead. Just how Calico said it would happen.
The heady groaning of cicadas. The silence of the leaves when the wind stops stirring. I lick my lips. They’re peeling, sunburnt. “Are you joking?”
“Honest to God,” Kip says.
If I strain my ears enough, I can hear the faint wailing of ambulances, which my deep imagination could mistake for a mother.
“We’re going to the college,” Tad says. He adjusts his baseball hat. “That’s where Calico will be. Are you coming with us?”
I stand up too fast and see stars and colors, but I don’t lose my balance. I do not wobble. The rollerblades make me taller than the boys. I don’t ask what they plan to do to her. They’d say something gross about gouging out her eyes and making her eat them.
“If you’re not afraid, you can come with us,” Kip goads.
“Why would I be afraid of Calico Daniels?” I almost scoff. Not because I have something to prove, but because I think she looks nice. I always thought she looked nice.
The University is closed. Our town was once a college town in the swollen belly of Illinois, but the world forgot about us, and people stopped coming, and half the town crumbled away with the school. The campus is still there, only empty. Add its heyday to the list of things we never got to see.
The sun is already low in the sky, shooting up the town with a heavy lacquer of light. Golden hour. Dry grass and dying wildflowers. Powerlines like puppet strings stretched out to the west horizon. The boys mount their bikes. I teeter beside them down our stretch of gravel road. We hit the asphalt, and suddenly I go fast. As I skate, I can just see the pointed peak of the University’s bell tower above the treetops, the pale frozen face of its clock.
Tad’s bike rocks as he pumps the pedals harder, and the wind whistles past so many abandoned homes crooked and skewed on crumbling foundations. The University is on the opposite end of town. Kip steers the bike sharply, dodging potholes and whipping down a steep hill. His shape grows small.
I pump my legs faster, cut ahead of Tad before I skid to a stop at the padlocked gates where Kip waits. When I jeer at Tad for coming in last, he doesn’t smile, and the sweetness of my victory goes brown.
Whatever name the University wore before its downfall remains unknown to us. The signs over the front gate have been scratched out so the only letters left read still univers.
Tad, panting, lets his bike clatter to the pavement on its side, wheel still spinning. Kip clutches the padlock and shakes the chain.
I wipe a drip of snot from my nose. “So now what?” I am a little embarrassed to admit I’ve never been to the University before. Mostly because Teddy always told me it was stupid and boring and not actually haunted like everyone said it was. This is the place where teenagers hang out lighting fireworks they bought a state over and crunching beer cans with big shoes. I don’t want to be the one to ask if we’re too young for this, so I flex my fingers, grab the padlock from Kip, and jingle the rusted chain.
The sun is thick and yellow as dandelions. I stare through the gate into the reaches of wild greenery beyond the fence. I’m not sure which is worse: an abandoned, empty public university campus with crumbling buildings and collapsed ceilings possibly haunted by ghosts, or an enclosed compound with classmates I haven’t seen in months and Calico, who is maybe a witch or a devil who made Danny die and can make the sun not rise, too.
But then Tad calls from a few feet away: “There’s an opening here.” I only see the back end of his stride as he disappears into the bushes. Kip leaps after him, and I am scrambling, losing my balance for the rollerblades.
Most of the buildings are old brick and crumbling. Tattered and worn campus banners with the school’s colors, gold and purple, are strewn across the pathways or tied to trees and fence posts.
Although the purple is now pinking lilac, and the gold is pale like nail clippings. The lawns are overgrown with weeds and unusually tall goldenrod that reaches far above my head, and I’m taller than the twins. The only birds are far off, a swelling belly of starlings in the distance. Silence knights the campus; it is transformed from a school to something more serious and solemn, a mausoleum.
“Shhhh, shhh,” Kip urges, motioning for us to duck as we crouch and circle the outdoor amphitheater tucked behind the old theater building. I hear voices. One voice, maybe two, rising with a lively elasticity. There in the clearing are two of our classmates, Lundi Masterson and Calico Daniels. Lundi is always following Calico. I am not surprised to see him here. With them is a smaller boy, maybe a fourth grader. I don’t recognize him.
“That’s Friar,” Kip says. “Dan’s brother.”
Tad is already stepping forward, his face gone white. “He has a gun?”
I do a double-take. It’s true. Friar has a shotgun perfect for his size, made for a child. He doesn’t have it pointed right now. Maybe because it’s heavy. Maybe because his arms are tired.
Kip and Tad are far ahead of me now, and I am teetering down the plateaued steps that descend into the amphitheater pit. My ankles bend as the rollerblades tip sideways.
I catch up to everyone. They form a tight circle, and Lundi is crying. Everyone teases him for crying too much, and they say it’s because he has seven sisters and no brothers. Kip already has the front of the gun in his hands and Tad is standing aside saying, “Get out of the way, Kip, and let go of it.
You’re going to get shot,” while Friar is trying to wrench the thing from Kip’s hands. The kid is screaming from the top of his lungs, one of those terrible angry sounds. I glide up and stop myself by ramming into Tad.
I feel like I am coasting into some brawl and there is a bright charge of anger in the air, the kind of upset I’ve been trying to distance myself from because its power is frightening and makes me do bad things. I recognize that in Friar, and it scares me. It makes my chest hurt and my voice burrow deeper in my chest because it makes me think of my sister, who showed me how to be angry that way until the feeling got too big for us.
Friar is screaming, “Let me go, let me go, let me go,” because Kip’s hands are on the gun. Tad is grabbing his brother’s arm like he wants to leave. Lundi is pacing, still crying, freaking out. He darts in front of Calico, then behind her. Calico’s face is plain and smooth. She watches Kip, then looks at me.
A gasp in my chest turns into words. I borrow my older sister’s voice when I say, “Everyone just shut up.”
By some miracle, I am powerful for one second and Kip lets go of Friar, and everything is quiet except for the wind in the trees, which sounds a lot like a sign of relief and a sharp intake of breath all at once. Friar hugs the gun a little closer to his body. His sweaty handprints dull the metal’s shine.
Little kid Friar, who is short for his age already, is the first to say something. “That bitch killed my brother.” His face is as cold as a man’s. His breath is heavy, like his lungs are fed up with crying. Kip takes a step back.
“She didn’t,” Lundi says, still crying. He is planted firmly in front of Calico now just a couple of arms’ lengths away from Friar. “She didn’t do that. She just said he would—and anyways, she was kidding.”
“I wasn’t,” Calico says, and none of us really know what to say. We don’t look at each other. We listen to the tall grass.
I have always loved the low, clear quality of Calico’s voice. I have never heard her sing, but I imagine she has a voice like the free wild songbirds that once lived in every tree.
Calico persists. “I saw the future. Danny was meant to die just like the sun.”
There’s a loud slap, and for an awful split second I wonder if it was the gun because I’ve never heard a gun, but I see the finishing arc of Kip’s open-palmed slap.
Calico clutches the side of her face, her chin tucked into her chest. I don’t know if she’s about to cry. But when she raises her chin, an impish smile curls the corners of her lips. “So, you believe me about the sun now?”
At school, Calico spends recess walking along the raised border of the playground like it’s a balance beam. Sometimes, she sits in the grass beyond the kickball field and watches a dandelion very closely. I don’t really watch her; I just notice her. I don’t go over to her because I want friends, and no one would be my friend if I were her friend. But she interests me, and I notice her. We were in the same fourth-grade class, and when Calico first came to town, you could almost believe she’d be perfectly regular. That recess, I sat by Calico on a bench and tried to get to know her.
She had asked very politely, “Can I tell you a secret?” When I nodded, she folded her hands together and smiled a little as she said, “I’m an angel.”
I have my fingers curled into claws and I hold on tight to what remains of my childhood, the golden streamers of it, the dark room closing against the din of the party as the laughter in the next room cuts short. I knew what she wanted me to say. I knew she needed me to believe her. And part of me wanted to. Part of me wants to so bad.
Dan overheard. He called Calico a crazy freak, and I shut up and stayed quiet. I feel bad. What’s the harm in wishing for wings? I think I should have told him to shut up. I didn’t. I don’t know if she holds it against me. And now it’s not like I have other friends. I only ever had my sister, anyway.
I squint at the sky.
So, there is loneliness at school, and there is loneliness at home, and the whole wide world is starting to feel like a great mouth closing around me. Soon, there will be only darkness. It could be a relief.
Friar is so mad when Calico says all that about the sun. I know that kind of mad. Mad recognizes mad. Mad in the way where it becomes your blood and if let go, your whole self falls into it, and the rush of it carries your body forward into action you can’t control. I know you can’t control it.
That is why I am the only one who doesn’t scream when he lifts the nose of the gun. The metal moves like some creature smelling prey on the air. It bobs its terrible weight. I don’t know if it is the weight or if Friary pulls the trigger on purpose. I am the only one who doesn’t jump at the terrible bang. Well, me and Calico, who is so very still and watching me when Lundi falls to the ground.
I shut my eyes. Behind my eyelids are the bright imprints of Calico’s irises as if I stared too long and too hard at twin suns.
When I open them, Tad is wrenching the gun from Friar, who is screaming his brother’s name over and over—Danny Danny Danny Danny Danny—and I don’t know if it’s a cry for help or of vengeance.
Tad throws the gun. The tall grass devours the shape.
Calico is kneeling beside Lundi now and petting his hair back like she’s playing pretend mom. Tad takes his brother by the shoulders and shakes him once. “We need to go get help.” The twins stand on the pedals of their bikes and pump momentum into the wheels. Their shadows stretch like elastic on the road behind them, dark and sharp and cutting like knives.
I want to ask the twins to stop their bikes and screech to a halt in the middle of the road so they can enjoy this sunset. It might be our last. But I keep stumbling forward and wonder why they flee so fast while my shadow drags and bloodies itself on the ground.
Kip calls over his shoulder, “Just wait there,” and I know it doesn’t make sense for me to go along, but I don’t want to be here with the dying.
It is then that I look at Lundi. He is pale. His eyes are closed. The front of his shirt is miraculously clean. Calico looks up at me, and I swear I can see clean through the Earth’s crust through her pupils. She says, “He fainted,” and it is then that I notice there is no blood, only a black mark on the pavement between Friar and Lundi.
The world dips into darkness and I think I might fall over. Am I the only one who thought he died? I try to ignore the bitter disappointment.
I can’t help myself. I cry. It’s the only way my body can get a breath.
Friar, who is also crying, cries harder, and I feel like him, like a little kid, and I hate him because nothing happened, and he’s still crying. All the hope about life I ever have had rises up to my throat and I need to spit it out or it will choke me. This is what it feels like to grow up.
I think maybe Calico is an angel, just like she said she was. Maybe she’s the frightening kind who can kill Danny and save Lundi and make the whole world end like it’s going down for a nap.
Lundi wakes up. I wipe my face, but my body won’t stop twitching with ugly sobs. A car comes by, and Kip and Tad hop out along with Friar’s dad, who looks tired and sad. He fetches the gun from the grass. Then, he takes his last son by the hand and holds on tight. They don’t say anything, just get in the car with their gun and drive into the deep orange of dusk. Hatred flashes through me. That kid is just leaving like nothing happened but his own loss. He has nothing to feel guilty about, and I hate him. Kip and Tad help Lundi up. They tell him they’ll walk him to the gate where his mom will pick him up. For a second the jealousy is painful, that he has something I don’t—someone waiting, someone ready to collect him. I want to bash my head into a wall a thousand times, but I stand still and cry instead.
It’s just me and Calico, then. The loneliness snaps and shrinks around us. She waits for me to stop crying.
Standing beside her, I feel horse-nervous and antsy, like I could break into a run and let the wind on my skin and hair wipe away all the nervousness and guilt I have about being alive.
The sun winks warm behind the buildings, golden hour dwindling into something cooler, bluer. The night will be heavy and warm.
“You didn’t kill Danny,” I say, which feels stupid. I am sure Calico knows that. I remember Dan before he got mean. He had a lot of freckles, and they were set so deep in his face that he looked like an echo of the sky. I steady my breath and wipe snot from my nose. “And I think you’re lying about the sun.”
Calico shrugs. “If the world ends, you’ll never have to grow up.”
I stare for a long moment. Calico does not blink. I turn my palms over.
But I do have to grow up. I already have.
“I thought Friar killed Lundi.” I continue my confession with the thing that doesn’t really want to come out. “I almost wished he had. Not because I want Lundi dead, but because I don’t know anyone else who has killed someone.”
“You killed someone?”
Somewhere around us in the grass and the weeds, a cricket takes up a song.
“She’s not actually dead,” I say. “She’s in a coma.” Which sounds so much like TV, I hate to say the word. My sister’s body is asleep, and her brain is mending itself. I imagine threads forming like sinews on a rising pile of yeasted dough.
Mom goes to the hospital every night after work to read to Theodora and talk to her and tell her everything happening in town. Teddy was supposed to go to college this fall, and Mom still wants her to, so she reads textbooks and great works of literature. She reads in Spanish, too, so Teddy doesn’t lose all her vocabulary. So Dad cooks every night, and I sit quietly waiting for time to pass.
“My sister.” The words choke me. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. But I did mean to. I was angry.”
Teddy could be awful sometimes. If it was her turn to do laundry, she would hold up my panties and laugh at the size of them. She’d tell me I was being a whore or a dyke for hanging out with Kip and Tad. She would tell me to shut up and stop singing because my voice was awful, and then she’d pick up the tune to prove the honey in her own voice. The worst part is that Teddy is everyone’s favorite. Not just our parents’, but everyone’s. All of my teachers knew Theodora, and my sister was this shining thing to become so I couldn’t be my own.
Of course, I understand. Teddy is my favorite, too. She is very funny. She is sweet. She takes me strawberry picking and gives me her old clothes. She is my only real friend.
“How?” Calico asks.
The distant stars flicker. I am sure they make sounds we can’t hear.
“Teddy has asthma. I was mad at her. I took her inhaler, and I stomped on it. I hid the pieces under my bed.” I can’t breathe as I say it. “But there was a dust storm that afternoon. You couldn’t see ten feet down the street. Everything was orange and brown. Months ago. Do you remember?”
Calico nods. The fires always come early now. The wind takes the smoke and casts it across the continent. The wind picks up soil, too, for everything is dry in this eventual heat.
“She needed her inhaler. I didn’t really know what to do.” My face is cold. Numbness sparks across my cheeks, my lips, the feeling of my whole face falling asleep. “Teddy had to call 9-1-1 herself.”
In the first days that followed, Mom would not look at me. I ate creamy peanut butter and drizzles of honey on white bread. I sat by my grandmother’s feet and watched colors flash across the TV without taking in any of it. Dad held me and let me cry before bed, but he did not say, “It’s okay. It will all be okay.” He just sat silently and rubbed circles into my back until I couldn’t stand to be touched and threw up. He’d clean it up. He’d ask me not to wet the bed again.
I am washed in the stillness that comes and goes between the panic of memory. If Teddy dies, I might get older than she ever got to be, and I’ll have to carry her along with me everywhere and imagine the space she would have taken up in my life. I wish I could forget her. I wish she was dead already. I wish I had never been born.
This shame and terror could be unending. I press my palm to Calico’s, and she weaves her fingers between mine, and I tell her I believe her. I believe she could be an angel if she wants to be. Calico doesn’t say anything about my sister, but she squeezes my hand. I want to ask for forgiveness from everything—the grass, the trees, the cicadas, and this angel—but I swallow past the rock in my throat and imagine I never have to go home.
The bugs’ night noises start to get to me, but I don’t want to leave. We stay put. I imagine my parents look for me, and I imagine they don’t.
Night comes. The darkness stretches on for years in all directions. Then I say, “If you’re really an angel, can you wake her up?”
I look into Calico’s colorful dark eyes, and the world carries on its ending in them.
The universe turns in on itself. Always in the movies and stories is this: we don’t have much time left. So, the end of the world, it’s nothing new. I’ll take it.
Except the birds. Except windows. The tiniest shoots of green in spring. The ruby bodies of summer strawberries, small and wild and edible before they go brown. The long stretches of highway where I can fall asleep with my head resting on my sister’s shoulder.
Calico doesn’t say yes. She gathers my body in a tight hug, pins my arms to my sides, and I think of Danny dead in the pool. I think of Lundi alive.
When it’s time for the sun to rise, I will ask Calico to change her mind. I imagine she has her palm against the east horizon and can lift it enough to let light escape like fireflies. I’ll see if she’ll bring her angel fingers together and pinch a hole in the darkness just big enough for morning.
Meghan E. O’Toole is from Illinois. She has received recognition as the 2021 Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest winner the 2018 winner of LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction.
Guest Judge: Stephanie Anderson is the author of the award-winning One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture as well as From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press). Her essays and short stories have appeared in outlets such as The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Ninth Letter, The Chronicle Review, and many others. She lives in South Florida, where she serves as assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University.
