Tenth of December

Content Warning: This story references child endangerment.

Marie drives her children Abbie and Josh on a “Family Mission” through farmland to see about adopting a puppy. She tries to get them excited about what she considers a beautiful field of corn, but they aren’t interested. Marie wants them to have a happy childhood as her own featured a “dour” father and a mother who was “ashamed.” Marie stays up late studying the manual for her son’s videogame so she can relate to him, and she says this has helped their relationship. Her husband Robert is a cheerful man who goes along with everything. She thinks of herself as a good parent, especially in relation to her own mother, who thinks Marie’s kids are spoiled. Marie recalls several times when her mother mistreated her, including when Marie was once locked in a closet while her mother had sex with a man. As Marie drives, she thinks the grace she’s been given and “new chances every day to spread that grace around” (34).

The story switches to Callie’s perspective, who is the woman trying to adopt out the puppy. She has placed her son Bo, who has mental disability, in the backyard, and she has put a harness chained to a tree on him to keep him safe. Callie views this as a good thing: “he was safe in the yard, because she’d fixed it so perfect” (34). Bo plays by himself and blows her a kiss when he sees her in the window.

Callie needs to rehome the puppy because her husband Jimmy threatened to drown the puppy if they couldn’t get rid of it; he claims it’s the right thing to do with “extra animals,” as he was raised “near” a farm. He once drowned some kittens so Callie knows he means it. After he drowned the kittens, he cried when their other children, Brianna and Jesse, called him a murderer, and Callie comforted him. After, he was not cruel to her, as he sometimes is, and had instead lain in bed with her making plans for their future.

Marie and her children arrive, and Abbie wants the puppy. Marie notices Callie picking up dog feces from the floor and is dismayed by the chaotic, unclean state of the house. She wants to urge her children not to touch anything, but she also wants to be seen as accepting. She agrees to adopt the dog, thinking “Had she come from the perfect place? Everything was transmutable” (37).

While Callie is on the phone, Marie goes to the window and sees Bo. She is shocked to watch him run to the end of his chain and fall over, then drink out of a dog bowl. Josh joins her, and she lets him watch. Seeing Bo in this condition, she thinks of her mother’s cruelty and all the times she wished an adult would have intervened.

Callie returns, and Marie says they won’t be taking the puppy after all and prepares to leave. Josh hushes Abbie when she complains, and Callie begs them to take the puppy. In the car, Marie resolves to call Child Welfare “who would snatch this poor kid away so fast it would make that fat mother’s thick head spin” (41).

Callie takes the puppy out into the corn field, intent on leaving it to starve so Jimmy won’t have to drown it. She sets it down and walks away quickly without looking back. In her mind, she starts to plan for what she’ll do when things get easier financially. She thinks about how much she loves Jimmy, then Bo, and she knows that if she can keep him safe long enough, he might someday have a stable life and a family of his own. When she sees Bo in the yard, she recalls the day before, when he had been so frustrated to be stuck indoors all day. She thinks, “Who loved him enough to think that up? Who loves him more than anyone else in the world loves him? (42).