BAILEY
I found Bailey outside my home before the sun had risen. He was older, his head flattened out with age, patches of skin where his fur used to be and wrinkles swelling up around his eyes. He shivered from the cold and whimpered like he used to. He was blind, but knew me when he touched my cold hand to his dry tongue. This dog was mine; my best friend from the age of six or seven.
He shook just like he did on the day my family abducted him and his sister from their litter. He sat on my lap that entire car ride home, crying. His dipstick tail poked out from under the towel my father had forgotten on the back seat. We were not the first family he knew. Bailey might not have remembered that.
His frail body shuddered into my arms as it had all throughout his life. His one desire was for warmth. I wrapped him up in our fuzziest polyesters and held him in shock. This old man, my son, my brother, my father and friend was dead.
He had died two years ago. Or maybe three?
We drove him to the vet when the cancer had won. His body convulsed and he vomited blood every night but Bailey either could not see, or could not recognise what was happening. He was up for breakfast at the crack of dawn. He bounded around the streets to mark his territory. He’d play, he’d fight and he’d win.
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This sensitive, shaking dog began life without family in a kennel outside. But soon, after years of convincing, he was allowed under our doonas to sleep in the warmth of his family.
He was a dog who would proudly wear his jacket out to the local park. He enjoyed having a sock stuck on his head like a blind bank robber in a backward balaclava. He would often steal the empty container of yogurt and clean it for us, his head banging around inside like a prisoner in confinement.
In the last moments we cried and comforted him. I scratched behind his ears, as he often demanded. A foul-smelling blackness erupted from his mouth. More liquid than I knew could be held inside his tiny body. Bile and curdled blood blended with stomach acid and breakfast. He convulsed. He whimpered. I’m not sure if he’d remember that we were all there.
But I remember waiting with him in that cramped room. Crying the last tears I could find in my body while running my hand over his fur. His breath stopped.
I kept rubbing his chest, trying to coax him back inside, trying to feel his warmth one last time. He’d gone out. I knew he was dead, but I stayed for as long as I could just to try and sear the memory of his fur into my mind. By the time I left, there was only a cold dog’s body on that steel bench.
And now I have him wrapped up in my arms. An old man. And I smooth out the wrinkles on his forehead. He blinks, slowly, with all the life he once had. His wet nose steams out into the cold morning air. He chatters and sighs.
I scratch him behind the ears, but I can’t remember what that feels like.
