Little Animals
Winner of the 2025 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Very Short Fiction contest.
~ by Kate Tooley
Hope bought the dog bed after a week of sleeping on the floor of her new apartment, after a week of her shoulder and hip trying to make softness of hardwood, her body trying to acclimate to loneliness. Her colleagues, and Elizabeth Gilbert, had implied that her post-divorce life would be an adventure, but due to budget constraints it was mostly box wine and not being able to afford furniture and the sour rot of garbage coming in the window.
She came face to face with the Great Dane-sized dog bed in the clearance section of a wholesale store so big she thought you could die trying to find dental floss, and she had to rest twice hauling it over the splintering beige tile. The first rest was on a kid-sized Mini Mouse lounge chair where she cried helplessly over the stepdaughter she was no longer allowed to see, and the second on a garden bench where she felt nothing at all.
It was a good sale: fifty bucks and she got a platform, a memory foam liner, and a machine washable faux lambswool cover. Being short had only ever made her a straight man’s fetish and the object of tall girls’ resentment, but she thought she’d just discovered one genuine perk.
It was a weird thing to do, she wasn’t so deranged with grief that she didn’t recognize that, but somewhere between the lawyer’s office, the good halal cart, and the Lorimer Ave stop, she’d put down her ability to care and forgotten to pick it back up. She imagined it as a glass bottle rolling from one end of a train car to the other, stubbing bare toes and delighting toddlers. After four years of trying to make things work, trying to fit her body around the shape of normalcy and her heart around someone else’s slippery, smooth-edged needs, the absolute purity of not giving a fuck felt like flying.
She didn’t plan on bringing anyone home in the immediate future, so, she figured, what did it matter what she slept on? She’d been just barely this side of “datable” before, but now, over thirty, a weight that felt good on her body but got her called fat on apps, and skin looking like she’d been through exactly as much hell as she had actually been through, she mentally categorized herself as not just undatable, but also unfuckable.
She had not, could not have, realized how many people have fantasies about screwing in a dog bed.
The first was a guy she worked with who came back to her apartment so they could go over project charts. He asked where her dog was and she said it wasn’t for a dog, it was for her. He laughed until he realized she was serious and then asked if he could try it out. She wanted to say no, but he was already lowering his Dockers-clad ass onto the clean microfiber. He told her he’d always thought she was hot, but neither of them had condoms so he came on her stomach. She brushed it off in automatic disgust, something she regretted later, scrubbing it out of the seams in the lambswool trim. It should have been validating, but it just felt like sliding into a pit trap.
The second was a woman from her Buy Nothing group who she’d offered some workout clothes to that no longer fit and that she no longer wanted to try to fit into. The woman took her from behind and growled as Hope came hard on her fingers. When she left, she took the sports bras and left the bike shorts, but not her number. In the bathroom mirror, Hope couldn’t see herself at all.
The third person was another man she’d met on an app and joked about the bed with. He wanted to be the naughty puppy, and she went with it because why not and he was good with his tongue. He begged her to scream “good dog” as she came, and she tried, but split the orgasm by bursting into laughter, stopping his tongue at a key moment and making her feel unkind and ashamed. She had to finish herself after he left, but later there was something unstuck in her brain, and she put her head out the window and howled until it turned into her first laugh in months.
The fourth person was a friend of a friend, a bartender she’d had a crush on for longer than she’d been married. Hope used to spend whole afternoons drinking crappy beer and thinking about touching the soft shaved sides of their head. It had been a bad habit for days when she didn’t understand a thing about her body and then later when her marriage felt like the mistake it eventually turned out to be.
This was the first of the dog-bed times that felt like a seduction. Back at the bar, she’d told them about the divorce and the dog bed and the people she’d fucked in it and they’d thrown their head back and cackled, stretching the soft fabric of their floral button-up across their chest. She watched them lean toward her as if they didn’t realize, as if they were both caught in a magnetic field. She sipped a martini slow as tantric sex till the end of their shift.
Back at the apartment, with two fingers inside her, and a hand on her jaw they said, “what words do you like?” and she said, “I don’t know?” And they called her sexy and beautiful and handsome, and words and words and words she’d never thought belonged on her body but did. When the orgasm hit, it was a sneak attack, and she curled up like something kicked, like a creature capable of holding this fierce, wriggling litter of possibilities. They wrapped their body around her, stroking a finger over and over along the soft skin behind her ear.
Kate Tooley
Kate Tooley (she/they) is a queer writer originally from the Atlanta area, currently living in Brooklyn. They write about the sticky corners of gender and sexuality; complicated families; and the myriad ways in which we become haunted. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and are an Associate Editor at Uncharted Magazine. You can find their writing in journals including Passages North, Wigleaf, and Barren Magazine.
Note from the judge, Annell López
I loved “Little Animals” for its audacious and creative exploration of vulnerability, desire, self-discovery, and healing in the aftermath of personal upheaval. The writing is engaging and humorous. I loved the narrator’s compelling voice. I also loved the story’s pace and well-organized structure.