Little Dog writes a letter to his mother, Rose, beginning, “Dear Ma.” Little Dog is writing to his mother in order to go back in time—like to the time at the Virginia rest stop when Rose was shocked to see the taxidermy deer head hanging on the wall between the bathrooms. Rose couldn’t understand why anyone would want to display and preserve death in such a way. Little Dog is also writing his letter to his mother to “break free,” like the monarch butterflies that fly south to Central America each winter. Little Dog remembers when he was a boy, just five or six years old, and he hid behind a door in the hallway to prank his mother. He jumped out at her, shouting “Boom!” Rose grabbed her chest and screamed, her face twisted in fear and pain, a reaction Little Dog attributes to her trauma from the Vietnam War. He remembers the first time Rose hit him at just four years old in their small Connecticut apartment.
Little Dog decided to write his letter after rereading Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes’s examination of his own mother after her death. The difference, of course, is that Little Dog is writing while his mother is still alive. Little Dog remembers the time Rose rode the Superman roller-coaster with him at Six Flags, only to throw up afterward in a garbage can. “I forgot to say Thank you,” Little Dog writes. He also remembers Rose trying on a fancy dress at Goodwill, one she likely wouldn’t have reason to wear. “Do I look like a real American?” Rose had asked in Vietnamese. She bought the dress because there was “a possibility of use,” Little Dog says. He also remembers Rose in the kitchen with a knife, quietly telling him to get out. Little Dog is now 28 years old and stands five feet, four inches tall, and he is writing to Rose “as a son.”
“I’m not a monster,” Rose once said to Little Dog. “I’m a mother.” He remembers reassuring his mother that she wasn’t a monster, but now writes that he was lying. The way Little Dog sees it, a monster isn’t such a bad thing to be. At school, the kids called him “freak, fairy, fag,” and those words, Little Dog points out, are “also iterations of monster.” Little Dog once read that those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder are more likely to abuse their children, and Rose was, and is, coping with her own trauma.
Little Dog had explained in an earlier draft of his letter how he became a writer, but he has since deleted it. It doesn’t matter how Little Dog came to write his letter; what matters is the letter. Everything Little Dog has ever done has brought him to this letter, even though he knows Rose isn’t likely to read it.
At five years old, Rose watched as her schoolhouse in Vietnam was burned to the ground after an American napalm raid. Rose never returned to school, and she never learned to read. Little Dog claims that trauma affects more than just the mind; the body, too, responds and collapses under the stress—and Little Dog’s grandmother, Rose’s mother, Lan, is nearly bent in half. Lan was forced to work as a prostitute to survive during the Vietnam War (Rose’s father was an “American john”), and Lan’s stories of her home country are rife with bombings and mortar fire.
There is so much Little Dog wants to tell his mother in his letter, but much of it is lost behind “syntax and semantics.” In truth, Little Dog doesn’t really know what he is trying to say. Most days he doesn’t even know who he is, just like he doesn’t really know what to call his own mother. “White, Asian, orphan, American, mother?” Little Dog asks.
“Memory is a choice,” Rose once told Little Dog, but he can’t help but remember. In one such memory, it is a Sunday, and Little Dog is 10 years old. Rose opens the nail salon, where she works as a manicurist, just like she does every weekend. Her first client is an older woman who wants a pedicure. Before Rose’s client lowers her feet into the heated foot spa, she reaches down and detaches a prosthetic leg at her knee. After Rose massages the woman’s calf, the client motions toward her missing leg. “Would you mind,” she says. “I can still feel it down there. It’s silly, but I can.” Rose says nothing and begins massaging the woman’s missing leg, the “muscle memory” of Rose’s arms working the “phantom limb,” her movements outlining what isn’t there. Rose dries the woman’s foot, and then she hands Rose a hundred-dollar bill.
It is 2003 and Little Dog is just 14. He is riding his bike to his first job on a tobacco farm on the outskirts of Hartford, Connecticut, where he is paid nine dollars an hour cash. Most of the farmhands are migrant workers from Mexico and South America, except for Trevor, the grandson of Buford, the owner of the farm. Trevor immediately introduces himself to Little Dog.
Trevor is a year older than Little Dog, and they soon become friends. They spend hours talking after working all day in the fields, and one evening, they go to the barn to listen to a Patriots game on the radio. Trevor picks up an old WWII helmet from the floor and puts it on his head, and Little Dog is struck by the “impossibly American” image of Trevor in the helmet. Just as the Patriots score, Little Dog begins kissing and licking Trevor’s body. Little Dog hears Trevor moan in pleasure—at least he thinks he does—and the helmet falls from his head.
Little Dog works at the tobacco farm for two more seasons, but he continues seeing Trevor all through the year. Trevor lives with his father, a miserable alcoholic, in a trailer, and Trevor’s room is littered with marijuana seeds and fentanyl patches. It is impossible to talk about Trevor, Little Dog says, without talking about OxyContin and cocaine.
The first time Little Dog and Trevor have sex, they don’t really have sex at all. Little Dog interrupts his story. He only has the courage to tell his mother about his relationship with Trevor, Little Dog says, because he knows she will likely never read his letter. After their first sexual experience, Trevor turns his back to Little Dog and cries “skillfully in the dark”—the way boys do, Little Dog says. A week later, they do it again, and Trevor violently grabs Little Dog’s hair, roughly yanking his head back. To his surprise, Little Dog is excited by the violence and stunned that it has a place in sex. Although, Little Dog says, violence is really all he knows of love.
Little Dog and Trevor refer to their modified sex as “fake fucking,” and Trevor is usually on top. One day, Trevor asks to switch, but when Little Dog slides his penis between Trevor’s legs, Trevor stops. “I can’t. I just—I mean…” Trevor stammers. “I dunno. I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t man. I’m sorry, it’s not for me—,” Trevor stops again. “It’s for you,” he says to Little Dog. “Right?” Little Dog pulls the covers up to his chin, humiliated. It is a dreary Sunday when Little Dog finally tells Rose the truth. “I don’t like girls,” he blurts out over coffee in a Dunkin’ Donuts. Rose asks if that means he will start wearing dresses, and then she runs to restroom and vomits.
Little Dog is on a train from New York City to Hartford, his phone lighting up with multiple messages. “It’s about Trevor pick up,” one message says. “The wakes on Sunday,” another reads. Little Dog decides to send Trevor a text. “Trevor I’m sorry come back,” Little Dog types. He hits sends and shuts the phone off, afraid that Trevor will respond. Little Dog is in the middle of an Italian American Literature lecture at the university when he first sees the Facebook post about Trevor’s death from an overdose. Little Dog leaves for Hartford immediately. Upon arriving, he starts to head to Trevor’s, but stops; Little Dog knows showing up at Trevor’s is a bad idea, so he goes home instead. It is after midnight when Little Dog opens the door to his mother’s room. He lays next to her on the mat on the floor and cries.
Rose once asked Little Dog what it is like to be a writer, and he is trying explain. He is giving her a “mess,” he knows, but it is all he has. His letter isn’t really a story, Little Dog says, “it is more of a “shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.”
Seven months later, Little Dog stands next to Lan’s bed as she is dying. She has been diagnosed with metastatic bone cancer and has just days to live. Sitting near Lan in her final days, Little Dog thinks of Trevor.
“Let’s just do it,” Little Dog hears Trevor’s voice in the tobacco barn. He promises to be gentle and stop if it hurts, and Little Dog agrees, silently nodding. Trevor climbs on top of Little Dog, and as he inserts his penis inside Little Dog, pain explodes in Little Dog’s body. Trevor begins moving back and forth, sending searing pain through Little Dog. About 10 minutes into it, Little Dog feels his bowels release, and he puts his head down, mortified. Trevor jumps up, surprised; however, he gently helps Little Dog up and leads him to the river. Little Dog silently cleans himself, and Trevor begs him not to worry about what happened. Humiliated, Little Dog turns for shore, but Trevor stops him. He drops in the water and grabs Little Dog’s thighs, taking Little Dog in his mouth. When he is finished, Trevor stands and wipes his mouth. “Good as always,” he says.
After Lan’s death, Little Dog and Rose take her ashes back to Vietnam for burial. While near Lan’s village of Go Cong, Little Dog wakes in the night to the sounds of music and laughter. He goes outside and finds the streets alive with celebration, a stage erected in the distance on which performers in drag sing and dance. Little Dog learns that the celebration is called “delaying sadness,” and it is held when someone dies unexpectedly in the middle of the night. According to belief, the celebration keeps the recently deceased’s soul from being lost in limbo, but outside of this well-known celebration, queer people are considered taboo “sinners” in Vietnam.
Little Dog can hear something that sounds like a wounded animal, and when he opens his eyes, he is in the barn on Buford’s farm. Trevor is sleeping soundly, so Little Dog gets up quietly to investigate the noise. Out in the field, he finds nothing, but as he parts the crops, he sees his mother come into view. Mist rises from the field, and Rose disappears. Suddenly, a herd of buffalo stampedes toward Little Dog, in the direction of a cliff. Just as the first buffalo goes over the cliff, the buffaloes explode into monarch butterflies and soar over Little Dog’s head. He looks to the field and, seeing Rose again, asks her how she managed to escape the buffaloes. “Too fast,” she says, and they both laugh.
