Pacific Highway South: Best American Strip City (Part 1), by Matt Briggs

Walking the Dog

I live across the street from a swampy vacant lot. Cottonwoods grow on the lot’s margins, and around the lot there are houses, apartment buildings, highways. There are a lot of people who never see one another.

A bird’s nest, empty most of the time except during the spring migration, clings to the cottonwood closest to my subdivision.

I’m not exactly sure what my stretch of suburbs is called. There is a sign on the arterial, but there is a sign at each of the three intersection of my neighborhood at the arterial and each one says something different. Pinewood, I think mine says. There is an Oakwood, and a Mapleleaf, too, I think. Inside, though, the same three house plans have been built on top of small knolls, in dells, in a steady rank up the slope of a long hill. Overgrown trees hold ferns in their the crook of their branches, and rotting birdhouses. Some of the houses sit among clumps of gigantic fir trees. The generation of maples that must have been planted when the construction crews first installed the units have matured, and the city is cutting them down, leaving smooth, whitish flat places where there had been trunks.

There are few sound of people in my neighborhood. Just the sound of the cold wind moving through the cottonwoods, the hollering of some neighborhood girls as they walk down the street; the sound their voices make fill the empty yards. The airplanes moan as they pass overhead. The traffic rumbles and hisses on Pacific Highway South. Even though my neighborhood is populated with people, everyone remains indoors. Christmas lights appear at night, strung during the day maybe, but there nonetheless to cast their light on the empty streets.

I walk my daughter’s beagle through the empty neighborhood. She stops to shiver and poop on someone’s lawn, and I pick it up with plastic grocery bags from Safeway. They are so thin I can feel the poop, still warm and fragrant, and then I reverse the bag around the poop and tie it into a knot. As soon as she is finished with her business, she rakes her paws across the ground, scattering moss, and grass, and then she pulls on the leash. I pull her back and finish tying off the poop. We wander through the dark neighborhood. I wouldn’t come out of the house if I didn’t have the dog to walk. Outside, though, the sun has just set and it is dark but Puget Sound glows purple under the dark blue of Vashon Island. A jet passes close overhead, silent, except for the rush of air. Banks of lights flash. And then it is gone and still around me there is the sound of moving people, and the houses are full of people and I am among them on the empty streets.

Matt Briggs is the author of three story collections: The Remains of River Names, Misplaced Alice, and The Moss Gatherers. His first novel, Shoot the Buffalo, won the American Book Award in 2006. He lives in Seattle, Washington.