A Bird in the Hand
by Ron-Tyler Budhram
Bird in Hand, Pennsylvania Dutch Country, is where the breeder lives, on a farmstead with a rocker on the porch and a pillow embroidered whimsically with the family name of Gluck. Our husbands step out of their Enterprise rental onto a gravel driveway, and the breeder must be at his day job. His wife meets them. Her accent, curiously Scottish-sounding, seems a romantic pairing with the whole aesthetic. Golden flyaways fight from under her head covering, whipping at the sides of her smile. And very earnestly there is no “mill” to be seen, no faceless warehouse of puppies’ howls—only the blazingly verdant countryside and its scooting buggies. The breeder’s wife is the recipient of their soul, enclosed in a thick white envelope full of a cash advance, a true maxing-out, for the designer dog worth everything, and damn everything else: Milo is a living teddy bear, a mini-goldendoodle born a Taurus on Cinco de Mayo.
Well, theirs is a hell in which Baby Milo howls the whole way back from Bird in Hand, and the husbands enter a new dimension of welcome mats soaked with designer-dog pee, a new phase in the life cycle of their studio apartment. Theirs is a compressed and bustling life in isolation, taking care of a puppy, and, occasionally, they regret Milo’s color—the brownness of his miniature-poodle sire. They pine that it isn’t the pure golden sheen of an actual golden retriever or a dog like kingtuckerdoodle, the TikTok star whose owners have captured the hearts of forty thousand. The only way to accept this universe is to accept it as one in which kingtuckerdoodle (who also has two dads) bumbles treacherously through at-home workouts that consistently trend. Choice pet products used by Tuckerdood’s jovial dads include a professional pet nail-grinder, an organic dog ear cleaner, a pee-pad holder, a comfy-looking dog carrier to rest against the body like a bag, and “Doggles” to wear in order to comfortably stick one’s head out the car window.
Their email is a wasteland of online receipts from DSW, Nike, Reebok, and Uniqlo, but it is the one from H&M that may still be of use. They are back at H&M, but this time it is the whole family, two husbands and their living teddy bear. This is one of the many stores on Fifth Avenue whose hand sanitizer reeks curiously, dizzyingly, of tequila. It squirts with the consistency of water onto the sales counter, and its fumes choke little Milo, their bran-brown doodle. It assaults them all at the register: the two husbands and the cashier. They speak defensively; their voices are forceful and overcompensatory, bruised.
You returned these espadrilles twice, right, you been here twice this week with your puppy? I need the second receipt, not the one from the original online purchase.
We only have that receipt. That one should work.
I need the second receipt. The cashier picks at the shoes and raises only their toes from the surface. This is the second pair? You still got the wrong size?
Our husbands are offended. My man is size 11, and 9 is the size he ends up needing here? I need to exchange this10 for this 9, please. Their confidence comes from also having been an employee on the shopping-room floor, in other days.
Fine, just give me an ID. A government-issued ID is all I need.
And so on as the doodle, cradled snugly in our husband’s arms, cranes his neck and chomps on daddy’s fashion mask, dragging it ever below the nose.
They leave and catch a break in the Friday-afternoon storm, long enough for them to run only two of the five blocks to the metro station before the downpour begins. Lawn furniture flies from a rooftop into the middle of a busy intersection. They run past a maskless woman who points at Milo and asks, where’s her raincoat?
Where is his raincoat, they say to each other in accusation, and must enter a cavernous Old Navy for shelter, umbrella-less as they are. The same choking, tequila-infused hand sanitizer greets them at the entrance, and they descend to the lower floor and let Milo roam. The floor is expansive, with finished cement underfoot and cracks in the corner region, spurting stormwater into large puddles. Milo squats like a frog and leaves his own yellow puddle. This Old Navy menswear floor is a subterranean graveyard. Faraway on the other side of the expanse, a lonely clothing technician folds away, mask intact. His table hearkens back to last season’s prints and has disarmingly low prices of cardigans at 2.50 and this is where Milo squats to pee a second time. They must own their baby’s mess, apologize with confidence while shrugging helplessly, and everyone finds themself in awe of the puppy. And soon enough it’s been forty minutes. The storm hasn’t let up. Milo's hypoallergenic, non-shedding hair is still wet.
But their moment comes, and the city seems cleansed. They have to run up three more blocks in the drizzle, their new Nikes and Reeboks intact, puppy bouncing along, and one of them Googles “shoe protector bags” while waiting for the train. Then they enter the subway car into a smokescreen of weed; herb is pungent in the air, and the few other passengers don’t seem to care. It emanates from a young maskless man in the corner. He nods with his joint at Milo and coughs up smoke, and the husbands huddle around their baby as best they can.
Agonized, they open TikTok and discover an overlong, sliced-up video posted by kingtuckerdoodle. Shockingly, the Dood’s dads are announcing their breakup after “two beautiful months in isolation.” The broken-up fathers are tearful and don’t mention their dog; they only cradle him in their pet carrier and bob his paw up and down, goodbye. It is all our husbands can do, not to picture something terrible happening to their own little Milo, Milo dropped onto train tracks, Milo with metal screws in his belly, Milo with a virus somewhere on his person. Anyway, yes, theirs is a hell.
Ron-Tyler Budhram (he/him/they) is a Guyanese-American writer living in New York City with his husband and mini-goldendoodle. Currently, he is an MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University, where he is also a creative writing teaching fellow for the current school year. He writes between Manhattan, Kansas City, and Santo Domingo, and has short fiction forthcoming in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, among others.
