Having
cleared away the previous night’s pizza detritus, the stale crescents of crusts
abandoned by her youngest daughter and boxes still moist with grease, she
stands alone in the bright kitchen, contemplating the hollow constellation left
upon the floor, the co-ordinates of his what she can only think to call
possessions, his presence now only in their bitten plastic pocks: the basket
between the cooker and the wall, the red and blue dishes for food and water,
unapproached for days, though filled and emptied and freshened in the hope he
might rally appetite.
Drifting
wisps of his hair move as little ghosts upon the momentum of air from the open
window.
The
week’s escalating illness had daily pooled upon the tiles in archipelago of
yellow foam; unable to hold food and retching up from out himself even water,
Judas had crouched watching in his basket, bewildered and forlorn with vomit
pendant yet from his soft jaw as pity and self-pity too replaced her initial
annoyance at each imperative disinfection.
She
turns to the empty nail high on the door jamb, remembering now mercifully left
at the vet’s the short lead of stiff brown leather, his abating energy manifest
in its diminished tension at her wrist on their last walk together only
yesterday morning, so quickly grown so old, implicit in which some sudden
incentive for his spirit to simply quit, the physical left to exhaust itself of
heartbeat and breath thereafter.
With
his life complete she understands everything important to be gone, that these
remaining of him are nothing, and while their discarding seems improper, she
cannot find within herself even passive acceptance of their value as keepsakes.
What
is left of importance is intangible, without or beyond substance; and
too there are the photographs, and the memories they evoke of her fingers in
the black-curled depth of his coat.
