After my thirtieth birthday, all I could think about was whether or not I should get a dog. All my friends had moved to New York long ago and I was the only one left in our home city. I didn’t see the allure of moving anywhere else anymore, even though California was burning up someplace new every week. All the typical things—the sunshine, the beach—wooed me into submission. Except I felt lonely in my apocalyptic Californian paradise, and I couldn’t stop thinking about dogs. Their hot breath, wagging tails, wet black noses, unthinking forever love. I’d drive to work, teach the kids about some books, drive home, and open my front door to what sounded like paws clacking on hardwood. But it was only the air conditioner blowing air at no one but me.  

Once, while teaching the kids about a book, I said the word “dog” instead of “metaphor,” and that caught us all off guard. One kid raised her hand, but I ignored her: I knew she was going to correct me. The hand would not stop waving and waving as I continued on with my lecture. The whole class went by, all 65 minutes, and her hand never went down. I thought she’d lose feeling in her fingers. Other students looked from the hand to me and back to the hand, and I kept talking about the book without stopping. The bell finally rang. Her hand stayed in my head, a fragment of a child, until I got back to my home with no dog to sniff me, no voices to greet me, no man to swoop me up. I looked out my window and watched the blue sky turn yellow with haze until the light darkened to black, nothing to interrupt me witnessing that passage of time. In bed, I browsed adoption sites again, hitting “like” below pictures of puppies, emailing myself links of the cutest ones. At least 20 from the past few months sat unopened in my inbox. Was I really ready for a dog, the constant dread of wondering when it would die, the difficulty of travel or spontaneity? Now that I was 30, did I even want the glamorous international life I wanted before? Was it okay for me not to?   

I slept that night beneath a cool breeze blowing from the vent, soothing but not enough. Temperatures in California had never been this high in any of our lives. It was so hot at school the next morning that my students were all red in the face, cranky and demanding. They groaned audibly when I announced their homework, and I wondered how I’d come into this line of work. After the bell rang, the same girl who’d raised her hand approached me in the hallway close to tears: “Help me,” she said, and I followed her into the teacher’s lounge. The way she walked in without hesitation frightened me a little. The confidence of the youth punctured my sense of what’s possible.  

“Look,” she said, holding out her paw. There it was, a perfect little paw: four padded toes and four black nails, gray fur coating each toe like wet gloss. It was beautiful. With her other hand she raised her sleeve up to her elbow, revealing the slick gray fur coating her entire forearm. I pet her fur, touched the rough leather of her toe pads.  

“I can help you,” I said, teacher instinct kicking in.  

We left school early. We both called in sick from my car. I rolled down the window for her, and she pushed her head out, breathing in the hot air, her ponytail flapping against her girl face. Soon I was taking the roads to the hills. Roads I hadn’t taken since the novelty of a driver’s license was still fresh and I’d drive to secret places to smoke weed with my friends. I swerved along those winding roads until we arrived at an open field I hadn’t been to since I was her age, 16. In my memory, I’d been here with a friend who made us pull over and pee on the side of the road. It was a bright afternoon and anyone could have seen us, and we laughed, the two of us squatting and unafraid. The field had appeared almost neon green in its bright fecundity, bright from the glow of being high and never questioning that the world was mine. That one day I would live in a foreign country, become mildly famous, somehow, star in an indie Barcelonian film. But now, the field was a fried yellow, no trace of my past. No trace of who I’d been, or who I’d wanted to become.   

I parked on the side of the road and opened the door for the girl, holding her paw as she leapt onto the ground. This kid had always seemed disengaged in my class, only raising her hand to talk when she disagreed with me, turning in work well below her potential. And now look what I’d done with a single word: she was becoming my new dream.  

“Go,” I said, pointing to the field, suddenly afraid of her. Already, a gray shadow of fur crept up her shirt’s neckline. But she didn’t move. “Go!” I screamed.  

“Are you trying to kill me?” she said, “Can’t you see what’s out there?”  

I looked, and just atop the hill of yellow grass was a ridgeline of smoke, and beneath that, the distinct flicker of wildfire. The fire crested the hill quickly, eating up the old grass that didn’t stand a chance. It was growing, getting closer to us. We hopped into the car and drove away fast. It grew behind us, and for a while I thought it was following us, just us, burning this stretch of road so that we would never be able to return to those fields. After a few miles, we thought we’d outrun it, or else that it had gone out on its own. But when we got to my house, a little blue house on a hill that let in warm light on afternoons like this, we could see across the valley that the fire was still out there, growing in all directions, glowing into the sky, the most beautiful sight in the world. The entirety of my old life, gone. Fire trucks blared their alarms all over the city, and the girl’s phone rang in her backpack in the hall. I grabbed it for her, because both of her hands had become paws by now. It was her mother. I hit “decline” and powered off the phone. When I returned, she was sitting on the hardwood floor looking out the window, her paws scratching nervously at the glass, tail tucked between her legs. Yes, I’d made this happen. All for me and my heart that still yearns. I set a bowl of water beside her and rubbed the soft fur on her neck, saying, “Everything’s okay,” because that is what you say to a dog, and she didn’t try to correct me.