The following is from Karim Dimechkie’s The Uproar. Dimechkie’s first novel, Lifted by the Great Nothing was published in 2015. Dimechkie was a Fellow of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and his writing can be found in the New York Times, The Saint Ann’s Review, and Empirical Magazine’s Best of Anthology. Dimechkie spent more than five years working in New York City’s social services while writing and acting as an MFA thesis advisor at Columbia University.
Sharif’s pregnant wife, Adjoua, had been distant for over a week. Her warmth and humor and affection stayed hidden behind a wall of invulnerability. So it surprised him when she lay on the park bench that morning and rested her head on his lap. Knowing better than to spoil the moment with a reaction, he sat perfectly still, letting the physical contact fill him with a bright and cleansing air. Her box braids were tied in a top bun that poked out of her green and gold headscarf, a few strays spilling over his thigh. Pretty as the braids were, he quietly missed the natural hair they protected. When unbound, her hair was a resplendent halo of vitality. But he knew the halo required a complex, labor-intensive morning and night routine for which she had lost patience.
Article continues after advertisement
The couple’s 150-pound, brown and white pit-bullmastiff lay at Sharif’s feet. Through the park fence, across Essex Street, and up on the sixth floor of a prewar building hung their small, dim apartment. Behind them, in the center of the park on an inactive ground fountain, were a dozen elderly Chinese women rehearsing a choreographed dance. They twirled, stomped, and snapped their red folding fans to the drum and fiddle music playing from a tinny stereo.
Sharif had eighteen minutes to finish the email on his phone before heading to work.
Subject: Dog Care
Hi Everyone,
Sharif here, Workforce Development Case Worker II. Forgive me for the group email out of the blue, but Merjem gave me the green light to reach out about a personal matter. At 36 weeks pregnant, my wife and I learned that our unborn daughter has leukemia. It’s certainly not what we hoped for, but we’re lucky to have caught the disease prenatally. Our doctors project an extremely high chance (98%) of full remission after the two-year treatment. I share this because our doctors have advised us to rehome our dog for the duration of the treatment to minimize any risk of infection.
The name our dog had when adopted was Judas, but that was unbefitting such a sweet and loyal boy, so now he’s Judy. He’s on the waitlist of every no-kill shelter and foster-care provider we know of, but we hope someone from our community will provide him with a loving home for that critical two-year treatment period. Judy is 8 years old, 150 lbs., and the most wonderfully lazy and affectionate companion imaginable.
This should have been easier. But unlike the friends and family he’d written to about this, none of his coworkers had met Judy, and Sharif struggled to present the dog’s less appealing characteristics in a way that wasn’t instantly off-putting.
Judy was cute in the way of big, slow-moving, sullen-faced creatures, but he was also an unusually burdensome housemate. Aside from his stack of physical issues — arthritis that required his 150-pound body to be carried up and down stairs; the unconquerable smell of urine on his pink and brown mottled belly, resurfacing minutes after a bath; frequent and poisonous gas regardless of diet or how they slowed his inhalation eating style (a tennis ball in the bowl, pouring his kibble onto the floor, hand feeding, etc.); chronic dry mouth that caused incessant tongue clucking, making it impossible for anyone but Adjoua to sleep in the same room as him — the real problem was his propensity for violence around nonhuman animals. So, no animal lovers or foster-care providers who already had a pet, which turned out to be all of them so far, were viable rehoming options.
About a year earlier, Judy woke up with a new core desire to annihilate any domestic pet within ten feet of him. His hackles ridged along his back. His tail turned stick straight. He bared his teeth and growled a brief warning before transitioning to death-battle lunges against his leash. The vet said this happened sometimes in old age. Sharif and Adjoua hadn’t heard of murderousness as a symptom of aging but didn’t have a better explanation.
In solidarity, Adjoua expressed contempt for any dog or cat Judy wished to destroy. When he growled at his confused enemies, Adjoua’s eyes went heavy and small, her lip Elvis-curled, and she muttered a mobster impersonation, saying, “Fugthatguy,” as she pulled Judy to the other side of the street. When Judy kept looking over his shoulder at the other animal, she’d switch to “Walk away, bro, walk away. He’s not worth it.” Whether Judy gnawed Adjoua’s shoes to death or stole the roasted Cornish hens cooling on the stovetop, he was blameless to her. She might scold him, but then she’d immediately apologize for scaring him and proceed to shower him with love, inadvertently rewarding his crimes. Like God, Judy was only accountable for the good he did, which was limited to sleeping, getting carried up six flights of stairs without fuss, shitting on the sidewalk, eating his breakfast and dinner, cuddling, playing, and being funny. Sharif perceived no sense of humor in their dog, but Adjoua said Judy’s self-seriousness was the funniest thing about him; besides, cuteness is inherently funny.
Sharif passed his phone to Adjoua, and asked, “Does the part about minimizing the risk of infection make Judy sound dirty?”
Adjoua held the phone above her face, grimacing at the screen like it showed a graphic image. He shouldn’t have involved her. Aside from her restless fatigue, upper abdominal and back pain, anxieties around caring for a sick child, and financial worries, learning they had to rehome Judy was what nearly broke her. After skimming the email, she passed it back and clenched her eyes in silent pain. Sharif felt the trees and buildings around them increase toward the sky, creating a sinking feeling.
Before Adjoua adopted Judy on her twenty-ninth birthday, people warned her that having a huge dog in a tiny apartment was a bad, even inhumane, idea. They were wrong. She met Judy at a kill shelter in the Bronx the day before he was to be put down, and had since provided him with seven additional, love-filled years in numerous tiny apartments. Judy was her prince. Her first and only unconditional love. She reflected on past romantic relationships as dishonest, imbalanced, or transactional in one form or another. Her friendships had somewhat rigid boundaries — polite, with limited capacity for addressing miscommunication or hard feelings. And her parents’ expression of love had always been conditioned on her achievements. They had emigrated from Côte d’Ivoire when she was four, leaving everything familiar and safe to transfer the sum of their aspirations into their only child, unable to have more. Praise and affection were given when academic benchmarks were met, Adjoua’s writing was published somewhere they or someone they knew had heard of, and when she got pregnant and married a nice man. Adjoua said her mother’s description of Sharif as “a nice man” was a euphemism for “a white man,” which corresponded with her mother’s white-is-right worldview.
Sharif and his brother, Walid, had fair skin, dirty blond hair, and light brown eyes. Their father was a Lebanese man who had progressively adopted total integrationism — cutting ties with his native country — and their mother was a redhead from an Illinois coal mining family. Sharif and Walid had a predominantly white bread American experience growing up in Shoreview, Minnesota, only occasionally reminded of their father’s Arabness. Adjoua’s mother had held in a big breath when asking Sharif if he was a practicing Muslim, making no attempt to conceal the magnitude of her relief when he answered no. Adjoua congratulated Sharif in front of her mother for being both “nice” and non-Muslim.
Out of a cultural avoidance for acknowledging illness and an extreme power-of-positive-thinking attitude, Sharif’s in-laws never appeared concerned by their future granddaughter’s cancer diagnosis. The only worry they let slip was about how little money Adjoua and Sharif seemed to make. Hadn’t they both been well educated, healthy, beloved upper-middle-class kids given every opportunity for economic advancement? Why were they so poor? Both sets of parents would have surely been willing to help with rent and whatever else was needed for the baby’s well-being, but the couple agreed that asking them for money at this age constituted a failure too great to stomach.
Before the pregnancy, Adjoua had no reservations about their professional paths as a social worker and fiction writer. They had been hard up but fulfilled in careers that had net societal value. They felt proud telling people what they did. But by the time of the diagnosis, Adjoua felt betrayed by her pre-pregnancy self: that idealist who believed if she pursued her dreams, the money would follow. How’s that for irony, Sharif heard her tell a friend on the phone the other day, as a result of refusing to shape my life around money all these years, all I think about is money. How could I have relied on something as fickle as the publishing industry? It was now urgent to her that they do whatever it took to give their baby the same safeguards and advantages they enjoyed as children — high-quality food, healthcare, schools, tutors, proper vacations, housing stability, and parents who weren’t stressed about bills.
Sharif was shaken by the drastic shift in his wife’s priorities, and her sudden dissatisfaction with their life. It was hard not to imagine this dissatisfaction spilling over into her choice of partner. He committed to asking for a raise at his nonprofit, but even if he secured the maximum possible raise, which was far from guaranteed, they’d still be one mistake, one stroke of bad luck, from being no different from his poverty-stricken clients when the baby came (the unspoken difference being that their parents would probably intervene if the threat of total ruin presented itself). So, in addition to Sharif needing that raise, Adjoua planned to double down as a freelance advertising copywriter, work that she hated. She had only resorted to copywriting once or twice to pay off towering credit card debts, which her adjunct writing instructor’s salary at Mercy College could do nothing about. She planned to build a copywriting portfolio strong enough to pitch to the big, evil Manhattan firms that offered big, evil compensation packages.
It saddened Sharif that Adjoua put her fiction writing on the backburner. Aside from it being an existential anchor for her, every signpost suggested her second book was going to be huge. She had published her first novel, Red-Out, a year and a half earlier. It was about a nine-year-old girl in Abidjan who ends up being the only living witness to her father’s violent crime. It came out with a small press for a $5,000 advance, which continued to be the entirety of the couple’s savings. It had a small launch and readership, but an unexpected review from the most important New York critic was triumphant. This attracted a new, high-powered literary agent and eagerness about her next book from prominent editors at major publishing houses. But her physical discomfort, brain fog, and financial stress had made the idea of writing a novel seem ridiculous.
Sharif felt inadequate for not earning more money. He dreamed of affording her the time and resources she needed to work on the new book. But social services was all he knew. It’s not like he could quit and join a hedge fund even if he wanted to, and besides, his low-paying job provided the health insurance they couldn’t risk interrupting now.
Sharif was glad when Adjoua’s new agent put her on the hook with the New York Times behind her back. Adjoua received an email out of the blue from the editor saying they looked forward to receiving her op-ed by Monday on the Daniels case, the latest high-profile trial of a police officer who’d killed an unarmed Black man. Adjoua was shocked that her agent didn’t check in with her first, especially for a subject she’d never written about or had any direct experience with, but it was impossible to pass on such an opportunity. She told her agent she would take this one assignment but then immediately return to her awful advertising plan. No more surprises, please.
A mask of tree-dappled sunlight shifted on Adjoua’s face, and Sharif pictured the sick baby floating inside her. Adjoua then rolled her face into his stomach, as if seeking to smother her reality. He looked at the sky, which sometimes broke up the helplessness that collected in his chest when Adjoua’s sadness entered him. He counted ten breaths while staring at a cloud that looked exactly like a brain. Two seagulls rode the air with outstretched wings, rocking side to side. A decade in New York City and it still momentarily confused him to spot seagulls. The city hid the ocean so well.
Adjoua spoke a muffled sentence into his gut. He said, “Sorry, my love. I didn’t catch that.”
Rolling her mouth out of him, she repeated, “Yes, the email needs to make it clear that Judy’s clean. That there’s nothing wrong with him.”
“Right. Yeah.”
She twisted further away to peek in on Judy — first with melancholy, then with doting amusement. Judy’s chin lay on his white-socked legs. His forlorn whale-eyes scanned left to right, eyebrows bobbing in turn. She caressed his massive head once before pulling her hand away to tend to an itch on her belly. Scratching at her stretched skin, sunlight shattered and reconstructed her wedding band over and over.
Sharif searched old emails Adjoua had written asking friends to dog-sit over the low-budget holidays they used to take. They’d managed to never pay a stranger to look after Judy, one of the many frugalities that allowed them to make rent. They had discussed leaving the Lower East Side for a neighborhood that didn’t devour 75 percent of their combined income on the first of the month. But moving itself was prohibitively expensive: penalties for breaking the lease, moving costs, first and last months’ rent, security deposit. Besides, even if a new landlord would accept such financially precarious tenants, the only places Sharif and Adjoua could afford now were so far outside the city that they might as well leave New York altogether.
Each time Sharif and Adjoua had found Judy a weekend caretaker, always at the eleventh hour, it was a tiny miracle. Now all those tiny miracles resulted in a pool of friends who would never take Judy again. Everyone found Judy instantly lovable, but no one who’d lived with him signed up for a second tour. Adjoua’s parents weren’t an option because they spent over half the year in Côte d’Ivoire, and Sharif’s parents and brother lived out of state with pets of their own that they preferred Judy not kill.
Sharif copied and pasted a paragraph Adjoua had written a year earlier, prefacing it with,
My wife wanted to add this:
Judy is so cuddly and sweet. He barks, but rarely. He’s not so great with dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets, or any other domestic animal really (in fact, he wants to kill every one he sees). Speaking of killing, he kills mice and cockroaches. Really well.
He responds to “come here,” “no,” and “sit” — treats (included in his bin) greatly increase his response time to these commands.
Sometimes he dreams about chasing things and will woof in his sleep. It’s alarming at first, then endearing.
He’s super housebroken (we take him out every 8 to 10 hours).
Oh, and last thing, you’ll notice he has a lipoma on his upper left shoulder — it doesn’t hurt him and you should pretend it’s not there. We had it aspirated and it’s non-cancerous, just unsightly!
He attached a few pictures of Judy, then closed out the message:
Sharif again. If you have any interest in meeting the old bear, or any questions or leads, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll see you around the office!
Sharif Safadi
Case Manager II
2242 Church Avenue, 4th Floor
Brooklyn, New York 11226
(718) 282-0108 Ext. 66125
www.CAPPA.org
Sharif hit send, looked up, and was startled by a man standing two feet in front of them, staring down at Adjoua. The man’s chest, neck, face, and head were a carbon copy of a Lenin bust, his bald head shining like white marble. Sharif bounced his thigh to get Adjoua to open her eyes and witness the live Lenin bust in their personal space, but she grumbled, No, I’m not ready. The man walked off. Sharif said Damn it, Adjoua opened her eyes and said What, and he said Never mind. He then skimmed two news notifications that confirmed the world was still run by sociopaths and their president was still that amoral man.
The sun had been eclipsed at some point. An edge of it now slipped past the cloud that used to resemble a brain and was now a brain on fire. Light struck Sharif in the eyes, and heat pounded his chest. Time to march the flock out of the park, get everyone safely across the street, and trail Adjoua up six flights of stairs while carrying 150 pounds of dog. Adjoua would ascend, holding her belly like a prize-winning pumpkin. She’d work on two pieces of writing today. One, an op-ed for the New York Times about racist police; the other, online copy for a to-go sushi restaurant called No More Mr. Rice Guy.
To Adjoua, he said, “Okay, my love. Message sent. Shall we get going?”
Adjoua’s eyes had clenched again. “You’re going to ask for your raise today?”
“Definitely,” he said. He waited a beat before reiterating, in as spirited a voice he could muster, that it was time to seize the day. That’s when he heard Adjoua, who never cried, make a whimpering sound.
__________________________________
From The Uproar by Karim Dimechkie. Used with permission of the publisher, Little Brown and Company. Copyright © 2025 by Karim Dimechkie.