BENNY
An old dog, an old house and a man finally learning that staying alive is not the same thing as staying.
Coming Soon. No release date yet, and nothing is available to buy or preorder.
About the book
Benny is a literary novel about grief, memory, queer love, aging and the ordinary creatures who keep interrupting our disappearances. In a rain-soaked Louisiana house, an aging man begins telling the truth while his old golden dog, Benny, nears the end of his life. Moving between present-day care and the relationships, losses and almost-lives that shaped him, the novel asks what it means to remain when so much of life has already left.
Benny began with the understanding that animals do not rescue us through speeches or miracles. They rescue us domestically, repeatedly and often inconveniently: by waiting outside the bathroom, leaning against a shin, demanding breakfast and making disappearance slightly harder.
The House After Rain
Benny was old the summer I began telling the truth. Not old in the charming way people say about old dogs who have gone pale around the muzzle, as if age were a little frosting added for effect, but old in the way porches are old after too many storms: bowed in the middle, silvered at the edges, still holding more weight than anyone had a right to ask.
He slept beside my chair while the rain dragged its fingers through the cypress trees and the house breathed its damp wooden breath around us. Every few minutes one of his paws moved in a dream. I liked to think he was running somewhere his body no longer allowed him to go, some enormous green field where his hips did not complain and the air was full of young rabbits making poor decisions.
He still saw enough to find me, though. That was all he had ever really cared to see.
Excerpt only. The full manuscript isn't published here.