Last bone

Pour yourself an extra large measure of scotch.  Get the bone from the fridge, it’s in a vacuum pack.  Find the scissors and cut it open.  The bone, a fine leg bone from a lamb who didn’t realize his or her sacrifice was for another creature not so different from themselves, is a bit bloody.  Perfect for the dog.

The dog has an orange squeaky ball in his mouth.  Show him the bone.  He’s not certain – this bone is too good, and the squeaky ball is too good too – and it takes a few seconds for him to drop the ball and take the bone tentatively in his mouth.  Nine years later, and after many, many far more delightful things, he still isn’t sure he deserves things this good.  He does.

Watch him take the bone to the porch.  He drops it and looks at you – open the door, his eyes plead.  You open the door.  He takes the bone back in his mouth and walks outside, down the stairs the vet says he shouldn’t walk down because his back is too fractured to deal with it, but he doesn’t care and walks down the impossible stairs and finds his place in the grass.

You sit at the top of the stairs, beside the basil plant and the parsley growing in the clay pot, and he collapses on the grass – his rear legs can barely support him and when he lets go of the effort his entire body just drops – and he grasps the bone between his front paws, like a small child with a bloody ice cream cone.

He is a dog and you know you can’t possibly understand what his mind is thinking.  You realize that that’s the way it is with everyone – there is no way you can possibly understand what anyone is thinking, there is no telepathy, you can only observe his joy, just as you can only feel your own sense of dissolving.  It’s his last bone.  There are no more in the fridge.  He’ll get some fois gras to wrap around the pills, including the pill you’ll give him tomorrow which will put him to sleep enough for the vet to inject the final vial, the pill which you think you’ll want in forty or fifty years when you’ll wait for the vial and the injection which you’ll deserve too.

He grasps the bone while he sits in the grass.  You watch from the top of the stairs.  For forty five minutes he chomps the bone without any care, without paying attention to his rear legs which can only barely support his frame, without caring about the mosquitos and junebugs and bumblebees which dive towards the bone with the same intent as him.

Time flows by.  The scotch falls into your stomach, it dulls your nerves but can’t stop the tears and the memories and the wash of regrets.  The bone slowly cracks and dissolves into mush that he masticates and slurps into his gullet.  He eats and you watch and you dissolve like the bone into his mouth, the tongue off to the side as he crushes the bone and the marrow.  The lamb died for this dog and you think the lamb shouldn’t have died but neither should this dog, but the lamb died and so will he and so will you, just far too late and you’ll have to relive this for another few decades as you consider what it means to be human and he isn’t.

The mosquitos bite your shin and attack your neck and you don’t care.  The scotch is eliminating your care.  You just look at the dog, his front paws like the small hands of your son when he was two and all he could do was hold things, not really manipulate them and certainly not hold the crayon that would write his name, but you think the dog would like to write his name too, with the bone he cradles so carefully as his jaws, still powerful despite the medications and the pain shooting up from his hip, he would write his name too.

Gordy.

His fur is soft, but something is wrong because you notice he’s still growing new warm undercoat even though the summer humidity should have told him long ago that it’s time to shed and embrace the sun.  He can’t; something happened a month ago, or two months ago, that you didn’t notice and now he’s hurting and in pain but now he’s just eating a bone.  All his being is focused on a bone, in a way that you can’t focus on anything.  You see the bees flitting to the lilac, you sense the need to send an email about the new job, you know you still need to give your friends one last photo, your sister wants the chance to give him one last belly rub, you know you need to find a way to sleep tonight but you know you won’t.

He’s just eating a bone.  Like he did when you first met him, coming off the ferry and meeting his foster carers and he jumped out of the back of their Jeep Cherokee with its shag rug remnant that he couldn’t get away from fast enough, on a partly cloudy partly sunny day in Bremerton when you thought you’d meet him and “then we’d see whether it was good or not” but you and the dog knew the second your eyes met that you were in love.  Not in love like people can be in love, but in love like people are supposed to be in love.  And the foster carers said, no, he’s yours, and you’re his, and we understand.

And you had a bone ready for him but you just held him and he loved you and you gave him the bone in the grass in the line next to the next ferry and he loved you.

Then you’re back on the top of the stairs, and he’s done with the bone.  He’s eaten as much as he can and his back is in pain and he rolls around to try to cure the pain but he can’t, and he walks over to you, walks past you up the stairs, barely making it up, and wants to go inside.

And you get up, a little unsteady and the tears warm and heavy on your cheek, you let him in, he needs a little drink of water, and then he finds his bed and falls down again.

You know it’s almost over, and so does he, but he needed one last bone.  At least he had that.