Last December I bought a thousand-piece, German-engineered jigsaw puzzle to assemble with my love over the holidays in a mountain cabin. During a three-day period of snowbound seclusion, working in shifts together and alone, we saw a picture emerge of thirty different cartoon dog species with expressions ranging from misanthropy to delirium strapped to leashes in the fists of a plaid torso whose noggin was lost above the border. Poised for jubilation circa two a.m. on the Sunday, we discovered instead that a single piece was absent, a bit of the headless one’s hip adjacent to his chartreuse poop bag dispenser. I emailed the manufacturer about our trouble. The first responder auspiciously requested photos of the nearly-completed opus with the precise location of its cavity, along with the bar code on the side panel of the box, all of which I cheerfully provided, only to then receive a follow-up from the department of missing pieces accusing us of item misplacement along with blather about strict quality control and a declaration that it was the company’s policy not to replace individual pieces but only to provide a full replacement puzzle which might have a different cut from ours so that even if we were to hunt for days among the new thousand for the fugitive morsel it might not fit. I rejoined that it was my policy to accept only the singular AWOL fragment which, if not forthwith delivered, would cause me to drive to their warehouse like the former astronaut who sped from Houston to Orlando with trench coat, black wig, pepper spray, and BB gun, to have a conversation with her ex’s new girlfriend wearing a space diaper so she wouldn’t have to make a pit stop, and then I would haunt that warehouse forever, rummaging for what had been so diabolically withheld. I might have added that our new-found disbelief in the likely completeness of any stand-in for the original puzzle had caused us to question the concept of entirety itself, that the experience of two amorously-related humans joining forces on a project that might resolve old issues is irreplaceable, that they can blame the dog walker all they want but we who had trusted and then been driven ruefully to search vacuum bags, kitty litter and each other’s pockets can now only imagine snapping festively into place the piece whose shape and look we know so well we could fashion it ourselves, then smoothing our palms across what we had made whole again, feeling only the ghosts of its seams.

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Ken Haas lives in San Francisco, where he works in healthcare. His first book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, as well as a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women. Ken has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award, and serves on the Board of the Community of Writers. His poems have appeared in over 50 respected journals and numerous anthologies.