I can’t imagine
not having my dog, the only dog that I’ve grown up with. She is eighteen years old, the same age as me
and still hobbling her way through life with a, well, dogged
persistence.
Sadly, this is
only half-sincere.
No, it’s really
not sincere at all.
I feel guilty
because we’re all waiting for her to die.
It happens so often that I don’t even think about it sometimes: I arrive
home from school before anyone else and in a Pavlovian trance clean up the
fucking lake of piss that has ran along the grout like water down a flume. It’s everywhere: on the rug, soaked into my goddamn shoelaces. I have to dry everyone’s shoes outside. Why is our house so idiotically designed? Who put the back door in the dining room and
without a mudroom? Fuck it. I’m still too lazy to move my shoes somewhere
else. You take them off when you enter, so
you can’t store them someplace else.
She tore both
of her ACLs— I want to stab my neighbor’s motherfucking dogs and bury them deep
in the earth for chasing her and ruining her body. Only one leg fully healed (and that’s a
stretch) so she effectively has three legs.
Where she once ran quickly as a greyhound, we now watch her shuffle across
the grass, but she remains chipper and still surprisingly mobile.
Her breath
smells foul because her teeth are rotting.
In fact, one time my dad and I found one of her teeth on the kitchen
floor and we spent half-an-hour trying to figure out what it was. It resorted to a smell-test which immediately
cued us in on its origin. The fucking mutt
looks and smells like a rat, with her reeking breath and strange, wet, goatee-like
facial hair.
We’ve
barricaded her in the back part of the house where there’s only ceramic tile so
it’s easier to clean up after her. We
shut one of the doors to the bathroom, and then block off the entryway to the
living room with a piece of plywood propped up on one end by a plastic crate we
used to store vegetables in and a vacuum cleaner on the other. And every time I trip over it and nearly
break my neck and yell “Fuck you dog!” she looks up at me with her cataract
eyes and my heart breaks.
• • •
Now half a year
has passed since our wish came true. I
didn’t cry. Not one fucking tear. I tried too.
My parents cried. I couldn’t. I haven’t cried over death in over half a
decade, even when some people close to me pass.
I don’t have to clean up piss any more like a Cinderella armed with bleach
and towels. But it still wasn’t a
relief. I’m an asshole, but I try to mourn.
Please don’t hate
me Lilly.
