Taxonomy
by Nicholas Claro
I’d gone to look out the window to look at anything that wasn’t Miranda, who I didn’t feel like looking at. Not after she said what she said. She said, “This doesn’t have to be ugly.” And after a minute said that what she’d said was something she had been meaning to say for a while.
Then I saw it out there, lying motionless in the backyard.
I thought it was a dog. But dogs don’t sleep like that, I thought.
Especially not when it’s raining.
My next thought was, Poor dog.
I must have said this out loud.
Miranda joined me at the window. A hand went to her mouth.
“What do we do?” she said through her fingers.
“What kind of question is that,” I said.
She followed me to the door. I stepped into boots and put on a jacket.
I found the shovel on the floor in the garage, below a hammer with a splintered handle that hung from a pegboard next to a saw with rounded teeth and a pair of rusted pliers.
It wasn’t a dog.
It was a large raccoon. Raccoons grew large in this neighborhood. There was a soybean plant nearby. The air always smelled like burnt popcorn. It drove them to frenzy. The raccoons were in the habit of breaking into the silos and eating their fill.
The blade slipped easily into the wet soil. It wasn’t long before I had the thing buried.
Back inside, I filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove.
While it heated, Miranda walked in.
It was really coming down now. Rain thumped against the windows.
“Was it wearing a collar?” she said, her voice breaking a little.
Now it breaks?
I shook my head. “There wasn’t any collar.”
“That means it was a stray,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”
“Would that make you feel better?”
She thought for a moment, her eyes watering over. She sniffed.
“No, actually,” she said. “I don’t think that it would.”
“It was some kind of mutt,” I said. “It looked like a really sweet dog—”
“Stop it.”
“—maybe with a little Border Collie or Australian Shepherd mixed in. You know, something I didn’t notice at first. But became more obvious the closer I looked.”
Nicholas Claro holds an MFA in Fiction from Wichita State University. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Necessary Fiction, XRAY, Write or Die Magazine, and others. He is the author of the story collections This Is Where You Are (Roadside Press, ’25) and Sedgwick County (Roadside Press, ’26). He lives in Wichita, Kansas.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Taxonomy”? For days on end I went back and forth on whether to take out or leave Miranda’s final line of dialogue: Stop it. It’s funny. It’s two words and I spent more time tinkering with these than I think it took me to write the original draft of the story. It’s one reason I love writing fiction this brief – every word matters. And laboring over them, as frustrating this can sometimes be, in the end, is really rewarding.
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