On the second floor of a beige stucco dingbat apartment complex in my Dad’s neighborhood there’s a window with blue curtains. I’m often visiting my Dad, lately. After (or sometimes during) a visit I take a walk. The window faces the street. It’s over a parking space. The space is sometimes filled by a truck. The window doesn’t have a screen. It’s a place that has a nice smell this afternoon because there’s somebody doing barbecue in the backyard. I can hear music with Spanish lyrics and the sounds of happy people drinking. It’s coming from more than one place. There’s a mixture of houses and apartments around here. Today the truck is there. The screenless window above the truck is open, always. Often, when I’m passing the window on my walk, the brown snout of a dog protrudes from between the curtains. There’s the brown snout. There’s the black nose. I eat an orange. The dog must be large if the snout is proportional. A Labrador, a German shepherd, I don’t know? It was a good orange. I would personally, were I the owner of the dog, be nervous my dog would jump out of the window after something—my Caracara orange, for example, or carne asada and a beer, for example—but that’s really small dog behavior. I discard the orange peel into the storm drain. I have become curious about the snout of a dog. My hands are sticky with orange. I use a tap in somebody’s yard. I take the phone out of my pocket. I go into the internet. I’ve been trying to come up with a description of what this is like. I don’t know why I need to define it? Like diving cleanly into water that is the exact same temperature as the air. Like water you can effortlessly breathe. Like a fluid that fills, drains away, the space around you. Aren’t a lot of things better left indefinitely indefinite? Maybe because it’s a new experience that became available to my generation, and that affects it profoundly, a thing to the ‘aughts like LSD was to the ‘60s and ‘70s—and here to stay. The human nose has about five million receptors for smell. The dog’s snout has about three hundred million. The dog, I think, is using the window. Though it’s use in a different way than was intended by the framer, the glazer, the landlord, the rental agent, the management company, and the rest of the small crowd of people involved in every part of an apartment in the richest and most populous city on the west coast. Sometimes, the dog barks. I hope one day as I pass the dog will bark to me, as if to wave, or say in dog, “hello.” I want to be picked out of three hundred million points of information.
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Joshua Hebburn lives in Los Angeles and the internet. He’s a fiction editor at X‑R-A‑Y. He recommends Scott Garson’s “Tell Me What It Is” from the New World Writing archive.