Excerpt from a work-in-progress on this National Mutt day for my most beautiful mutt.
April 2019
I hear, tonight, no distant thud-drone of a beach goer’s car stereo.
No shore break. No train.
Seagulls sleep silent in the spring cool.
Your breathing, ended forever, opens a gulf of aching peace.
I want my disturbed sleep back—my dreams punctuated with mumbling monsters that sounded oddly like wet, canine snores. I miss 4 a.m. earthquakes as you threw yourself against the bed to wake me for urgent backyard trips. I want to trip over the dark hulk of you lying curled on the floor next to my bed, your musk gathering on my heaped winter clothes.
It’s a fact that only you can truly fill this dearth of dog. Your grumbling groans. Your dreamy sighs. Your shifts and turns and the tick shish tick shish of claws on tired old limbs as you shuffled to your bowl in the early morning dark for a sloppy drink from crockery.
It’s a fact that though there will be another furred friend, loved, adored even—you are a piece of my soul like no other. There is no Big-Dog shaped peg left in this universe. You were the one and only. I waltz over a shadow in the dark—your pillow, so dense with you—and moments later return and spin, sink into my covers, embrace the silence—and sleep.
Last Updated on December 29, 2022 by Lee Ellis
