On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Protagonist Little Dog decides to write to his mother after reading Roland Barthe’s Mourning Diary, though his mother is still alive. He recalls her horror at seeing a taxidermy deer and the time he triggered her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by shouting “Boom!” while dressed as a soldier. Little Dog remembers trying and failing to teach his mother to read. She was abusive to him as a child. Little Dog recalls various instances of his closeness with his mother, marred by her instability. He finally told his mom to stop hitting him when he was 13.

Little Dog muses on migration through the fragile lives of monarch butterflies; only the butterflies’ “children return; only the future revisits the past” (8). He wonders, “What is a country but a life sentence?” (9).

Little Dog is 28 years old. He describes himself as “handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else” (10).

He recalls the time that his mother stopped cooking and said, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother” (13). Little Dog comforted her; but he lied. He wanted to tell her that “a monster is not such a terrible thing to be” (13). He speculates that her abusive ways stem from her PTSD.