RECURRENCE

1.

Breed dogs – white, fluffy, indeterminate things. Start with four. Worse than
bunnies. Even puppies have puppies. Raise them in secret with two shadows.
This is a scheme. A purple pallor cast across the street. Don’t know who is
whose anymore. Know humans consider this important: lineage.

2.

Can’t count them. Suffer, trying to pin down moving variables. Try all sorts of
systems: colors, numbers, but never, names. Donate all of them: scam be
damned! Hurtle into a church like Esmeralda. Lay dogs down. Plead for
mercy. The priest, a young Chinese woman, opens the door, envelopes me. I
am hers. I am a Christian. I am finally good.
Hallucinating, but I know: I am not good, I am merely under the
thumb. One moment a maniac, at another: a queen.

3.

Red tapestries. A church so lush. But a church is just a building. She lists all
the dogs for sale. She makes thousands. Even her website is polished. Dogs,
exchanged for coin? It is a maze of velvet. Nowhere to hide from the
totalizing, optimized, inevitable—

4.

The priest comes later, presents in tow. She knows who has bred the dogs,
bred them into anonymity. She blessed them, then distributed them in return
for capital, something I could not have done. Now they are named — named
property. I did not want to sell my loves. I do not love to sell!

5.

End with four. One dies, curled in my arms. A sweet one. Stroke him. Rue the
night I trusted anyone with the charge of love. Surely I could have sustained
them all. I was theirs. When you are hungry you will eat what you have.

Today I wake up happy.

I haven’t dreamt of murdered women floating in lakes—myself, split in two, a man and a
woman. The man the murderer, the woman the accomplice. The woman in the quarry hasn’t
drowned, someone has slit her throat. She is not round because of turgidity. I am close to her, so I
might as well be her, but I also am far away, and I have the knife.

Helen Macdonald writes of having to put a rabbit, sick from a virus, out of its misery: The
archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had
forgotten. How sick is sick enough. Every cycle is destabilized. Even my own microbiome. Look at me
wither away.

I had been sleeping for two days since I received the news. My last grandparent. She has not
visited me as others have, but she has sent me these dreams. Maybe that is her generosity. We had
mutually decided to forget the other. She liked to cry. She cried every birthday of mine. When I lived
with her, we talked about a man who kept a pet tiger. They slept in bed together. “One day the tiger
will wake up to its own killing instinct,” I said to all the men at the dinner table who did not hear me,
ever. I would have been proud of my precocity had it mattered to anyone else. She heard. She swatted at
me: “there is no killing insect!”

What goes on in the black and jagged line of the mesas in the day: is it dry, sparse and yet,
relentlessly alive like the canyons I’ve seen? To grieve the world is to know it exists, beyond you, beyond
your power and your embrace. An American destroys an ecosystem in Venezuela with an errant
campfire. Species in a chaotic balancing act of life are interrupted. Desire is a technology. I despise him
the American; I am him (an American); maybe if I sleep, it will all end sooner (who would cross it off
my Todoist?); will I see the lost ones then, because that would be nice.

I go to work because I have to. I lead a discussion on degrowth with STEM majors who stare at
me with a deadened look. Maybe I am mistaking hopelessness for callousness. Maybe they are just
timid. Maybe it is I, the hapless graduate student, who dreams of slain women and discarded dogs, who
brought mourning into the classroom. I want to rush to an end so that we can all stop. Even stop this
discussion where I am the only participant. Is fatalism the death rattle – or have I not allowed myself to
fully formulate a thought. Avoidance is a beautiful tactic. It hangs time on a hook and walks away. I
turn over. I look out the window. In tonight’s particular sunset, my friends the mountains they
soften lose their harshness hush into roses and saffron look delicious and alive familiar and divine
different to the day.
They look approachable.

Aditi Kini writes prose, scripts, and other text objects from an office with butterscotch walls in Queens, NY.

Aditi’s writing has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Catapult, and elsewhere. ORIENTAL CYBORG (February 2024), a collection of notes, jokes, and queries on race, automata/automation, and globalization, won Essay Press’s Chapbook Prize.

2024 also saw the award-winning festival run of PROBLEMATIC (BRIC TV), a satirical look at the hot take/outrage cycle machine that Aditi, co-creator, was once part of.

A finalist/alternate for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Aditi is grateful to have been supported by Bread Loaf, Ragdale, Ox-Bow School of Art, Jerome Foundation, Anderson Center at Tower View, Monson Arts, UC San Diego and Wesleyan University. Aditi is now a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

Two dogs have Aditi, and they make life worth living.