The Last Living Thing

The dog's breathing had changed sometime around 3 AM. Sarah lay beside the golden retriever, watching the rise and fall of Buster's chest slow to something that barely resembled life. Her iPhone glowed on the nightstand, a persistent reminder of work emails she should answer, but for three days she'd been existing in that suspended state between obligation and grief—the space where you move like a zombie through rooms you once knew intimately.

Buster had been David's dog originally, a joint custody arrangement that somehow summed up everything about their marriage. When David left eight months ago, he'd said, "You keep him. I can't give him what he needs." The same words he'd used about Sarah.

Now she scratched behind Buster's ears, feeling the strange papery thinness of old age. His tail gave a single thump against the mattress. Her phone buzzed again—David this time, probably checking if she'd taken Buster to the vet yet. She'd told him yesterday this was coming, and he'd offered to come over, as if his presence could somehow fix the inevitable decay of living things.

Sarah reached for the iPhone, her thumb hovering over David's messages. Instead, she opened the photos: Buster as a puppy, David laughing in that faded swimsuit, summer 2019, before everything became complicated. She scrolled through years of captured moments, each one a small death.

"You don't have to stay," she whispered to the dog. But she wasn't sure if she was talking to Buster or herself.

Buster's eyes opened, clouded with that milky whiteness of age. He looked at her with something that might have been recognition. Sarah set down the phone and rested her forehead against his. The screen went dark, leaving them in the quiet of 3:14 AM, two living beings in a room full of memories, waiting for whatever came next.