What the Dog Knows

Elena stood in her garden at dusk, her hands caked with soil. The spinach leaves were finally coming in—tender, vibrant green things that Marcus had never liked. He'd called them rabbit food, wrinkling his nose at dinner while she pushed them around her plate, complicit in her own small surrender. Now she ate them raw, straight from the stem, bitter and earthy and real.

Barnaby—Marcus's golden retriever, though he'd been hers for six months now—pressed his warm flank against her leg. He still looked at the door sometimes, that hopeful expectancy in his amber eyes. Dogs didn't process departure in linear time. To Barnaby, absence was just a prolonged version of the wait before the key turned in the lock. She envied him that particular blindness.

"He's not coming back," she told him, not for the first time. Barnaby thumped his tail, certain this was merely another misunderstanding between humans.

The burden of it—she had learned to bear that weight, the way an unused limb grows dense with potential energy. Friends asked if she was lonely. She'd stopped explaining that loneliness was different from solitude, that her own silence didn't need filling. That the spinach growing riotous in the raised beds was more companion than Marcus had been in his final year, his absence more present than his actual presence.

She straightened, her knees popping. Barnaby sighed, settled onto his haunches. The sun dipped below the ridge, painting the sky in violent bruised colors—purple and gold bleeding together. In the house, the phone would ring eventually. Her mother, her sister, someone worried she was receding. But here, with dirt under her nails and dog breath on her calf and spinach leaves bitter on her tongue, Elena felt entirely, devastatingly herself.

"Good boy," she said, and meant: I'm learning to be one too.