Quar-unseen
- Oscar the Pooch
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
Beyond Las Vegas, most of the West is wild and untamed, even in modern times. It’s a land so fierce that even the plants have claws. The sky is full of sun and stars, and isn’t concerned with serving witches. Wild one-eyed dogs with peg-legged limps roam the roads like pirates searching for buried treasure in the food wrappers and bottled messages thrown from wagon windows. Car-trails run naked without pavement to hide their bumps and potholes. Even the road signs have bite marks like bullet holes.
Mom is at her stillest when traveling. Her thought bubble shows nothing but static and a minute grows to fill a lifetime while a whole lifetime can fit into a minute. Now that we were beyond the land of traffic and rules, Mom settled into a road trance. Sometimes I thought she could drive round and round the world like that for the rest of her life, only stopping at a gas station a few times a day.
We all get treats at the gas station: Mom gets bubbly water and bubblegum, I get cheese sticks or hot dogs, and the Wagon gets to fill up. The Wagon lived on an all-juice diet, feeding through a straw while Mom was inside the potty-and-cheese-stick shop. In northern Arizona, I sat in the driving chair supervising the Wagon’s snack time and spying on the people at the other juice boxes while Mom was inside. The shelter over the juice boxes muted the banging of rain on the roof, so I could hear their conversations through the closed windows.
“We’re just picking up some essentials before we go into quarantine for a few days,” the one from the car full of people puppies said.
“They’re already out of canned soup and toilet paper in there,” the one with the pickup truck said. If Mom were one of those hikers who mark her territory with a tacky white flag, we’d really be in trouble. Mom hates to run out of things, so it was a good thing I’d taught her how to find toilet paper in nature.
“… We were only supposed to come for the weekend, but my sister’s refusing to come back to Boulder with me until Colorado is as safe as Utah,” a woman with a bike rack on the back of her car told a woman whose car was covered in bumper stickers.
As my ears roamed juice boxes, my eyes stayed stuck to the door where Mom had disappeared. Every time the door opened, instead of Mom, a bandit or a veterinarian came out carrying big bags of loot. I’d learned from movies how masked bandits roam the desert with bandanas over their faces, but I’d never heard of bands of veterinarians sticking up a train. Veterinarians give me the willies. You can’t trust anyone who covers their smile before patting you. Sure, they seem nice… until they take you into the back room where Mom can’t protect you. Whose temperature did all these veterinarians come to this gas station to measure? And was Mom okay in there without me?
Mom finally appeared in the door with a spooked look on her naked face.
“Oh, thank dogness you’re safe!” I wagged. “I thought the place was being held up by a band of swashbuckling veterinarians with a bad case of diarrhea. I was afraid they were holding you hostage for a toilet paper ransom. By the way, what does quar-unseen mean?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“The people in the next car were talking about it while you were inside. They said they needed lots of toilet paper because they were going into quar-unseen. Is that when you’re alone in the bathroom and no one can hear you call that the roll is empty?”
“Quarantine is when you have to stay away from people because your presence could kill someone,” Mom explained like there was no need to be so dramatic. “These people are talking about locking themselves inside their houses starting tomorrow. They don’t even know when they’ll come out again.”
“And they’ll be spending all that time in the bathroom? Is that why toilet paper will save their lives?”
“Nah, people just don’t know how to deal with scarcity. When they think about what they can’t live without, their first thought is the experience that makes them feel deprived most often. And do you know what the most lonely, isolated feeling in the world is for an American?”
I imagined my own worst feeling. “Getting snacky when the treats are on a high shelf and you can’t reach?” Too late, I remembered that unlike dogs, humans can climb on counters to reach the highest shelves. “No, wait. Just kidding. That’s not my guess.” I thought through my years of Mom observations trying to figure out the one thing she couldn’t live without. It wasn’t thirst, because humans can conjure water inside their stuck houses. “Their witches!” I guessed. “Final answer.”
“Good guess, but the only situation where you feel more desperate and alone than when there’s no cell service is when you’re in a public bathroom and you realize too late that your stall is out of toilet paper. Nothing makes you feel more unclean and alone.”
