Tiny ’s interactions with her lover revolve around this point, with her lover reminding Tiny of the ways her husband has “clipped wings,” using his doghood to circumscribe “the monster underneath.” Chouette ’s growth inaugurates more acts of seeming monstrosity: during a routine sonogram appointment, Tiny intuits Chouette ’s precocious distaste for medical equipment, feels the fetus inside her “ a piece of uterine wall into beak…shaking head back and forth ferociously” and demanding escape. If Tiny ’s alienation from the dog-people is grounded in a lack of shared reality, then it is a shared counterreality that brings her into solidarity with her owls. “That way,” she notes, “no logic can trap me, no rule can bind me, and no fact can limit me or decide for me what ’s possible.” This orientation, lived and linguistic, toward the impossible, the opaque, and the confounding rises in intensity and implication throughout her time raising Chouette and encountering her owl-lover. The wives of neighborhood men, for example, speak in “ concrete word-bricks,” while Tiny is intimate with metaphor. Instead, she struggles to understand them, questioning, even, their base in a shared reality. Tiny ’s weirdness has long alienated her from the compliant “dog-people” (a far cry from the rebellious “bitches” within The Book of Dog) with whom she is expected to feel solidarity and even love. Elements Contest 2018: Character | Dialogue Setting.
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