Dinosaur by Richard Siken

When I was in the hospital and my head was full of noise and snow I still knew who Andy was.

Dinosaur

by Richard Siken

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My housemate’s girlfriend has a kid who stays with us half the week. He’s kind of slow for a ten-year-old, but everyone keeps insisting that he’s six. His hair’s too long but I don’t really know what he looks like because I won’t look him in the face. He’ll barrel into the kitchen, saying something about dinosaurs, and stop abruptly, saying You’re not Andy. I never turn around because sandwiches are important and he shouldn’t be encouraged to barrel into a room without looking, thinking that it’s safe because rarely is anything safe, and most people aren’t Andy, and they will just take what you say about dinosaurs and twist it around until you sound crazy. Also he probably has jam on his face and dirty hands. Also I don’t want to turn around and look him in the face and scare him with my face, which is a sad face, the face of someone going through a difficult thing and not handling it very well. He isn’t messy, not really, just too young to understand that you have to clean as you go because messes compound and you have to confront the things you’ve ruined before they drown you in wreckage and filth. Unless he’s ten, in which case he’s old enough to learn. Also he got shampoo all over the bathroom because he was pretending he didn’t know how to wash his hair, hoping someone else would do it for him, but he put on such a good show that he convinced himself that he didn’t know how to do it after all, and he scared himself, which is pretty much what I do all the time, so it was irritating and made me feel self-conscious. If he’s six, he probably looks cute with jam on his face. If he’s ten, probably not. I don’t know what I’d do if he was sixteen, standing behind me with too-long hair and jam on his face, going on about dinosaurs with his dirty hands and not looking up and not realizing that I’m not Andy. When I was in the hospital and my head was full of noise and snow I still knew who Andy was. Also there are dogs. I call them Dog, Other Dog, and Little Dog. I won’t learn their real names. The only reason you name a dog is so you can tell it what to do. I don’t know what to do so I’m staying out of it. I don’t look the dogs in the face either. Once you look something in the face it starts to want things.