A Catalogue of Broken and Lost Things

A Short Story

Photo by okay wakeup on Unsplash

A tattered stuffed dog. My brother’s stuffed dog. Threadbare at the neck where he hugged it, held it till it fell apart, the neck snapping from the body. I say snapping but what I really mean is tearing, or just crumbling, because the fabric was worn to mesh, the spider web of threading that lay beneath the mangy, gnarled polyester of the dog’s fur loved to bareness. Loved to nothingness, so that the head just fell from the body. And Davy held it up, presented it like the thing he worst feared had just happened. Like we could fix it. And I laughed. Because Davy was twelve years old, too old for stuffed toys. No. I laughed for the same reason Davy cried. I had expected it all along. It had finally happened. You don’t carry around a stinky thing like that for twelve years and expect it to hold together. But do you see? I laughed, so maybe that makes me heartless. All I know is that it was better than crying. My father stored that stuffed dog in a drawer while my mother promised she would find a way to fix it, until Davy forgot about it.

The Distracted Writer is a newsletter founded on the conviction that my “distractions” from writing can often be my greatest sources of inspiration. It includes book recommendations; insights into writing, publishing, and parenting; and original pieces of creative fiction and nonfiction. I’m Alexa T. Dodd (hi!), an award-winning author and mother to three amazing boys. Thank you for reading!

This story was originally published in the Joie de Vivre Summer 2023 Print issue