Butterfly Eyes

In the trees outside her second-story home office, birds chatter manically, the way they seem to on only spring mornings. Somewhere along the street, a neighbor’s dog is caught in a cycle of howling, a plaintive, almost desperate sound, as if in a state of pain or alarm.

Isabelle leans toward the door to the hallway, listens for Himmel, the darling rescue hound her cousin, Seth, left in her care when he set off for Afghanistan. “Sky,” Seth explained, the meaning of the dog’s name. “Or heaven, if you still believe that exists.”

It took great discipline for Isabelle to take on the dog. After the loss of her own sweetJones. Still, how could she tell her beloved cousin no. Afghanistan for gods’ sakes.

 She blocks the thought of the nest of hair that’s gathered on the sunroom doormat, where Himmel’s probably sleeping. How unlike her to let the house go like this.

The open window leaks the air-fouled residue of the neighbors’ chimineas; already the attic fan is whirring, a sound usually not heard until hours later.

She stands to close the window, retrieves her mug of coffee from the desk, slumps back into the overstuffed steno chair, the single item claimed from the booty over which her two siblings are still grappling.

From the wall above her desk, the Seth Thomas—her parents’ grad-school gift—looks down on the room, its constant hands clicking off the seconds and minutes, as it had the weeks before the funeral, its faithful chime marking each arduous hour and its half, until the day surrendered to the next.

How mindless she’d been, squandering those precious days.

That last day, time rushing toward them; two short tumblers of Syrah on the bedside table, a satin-cased pillow tucked under the elbow of her mother’s left arm, the curtains pulsing in the warm air of the open window, as they clinked glasses. “A good day to die,” her mother assured Isabelle, with the same tone she would suggest a bright new novel or film.

Her vibrant mother. Never sick a day in her life. Why her, when so many others remained? The brutality of it, the horrifying injustice. A disease named after a baseball player, for Chrissake. The verdict from the perfunctory doctor’s mouth an insult to the spirit those few words so efficiently dismissed.

A soul of such kindness and patience. Grace, Isabelle’s grandmother used to say, the singular quality that defined Isabelle’s mother; which, Grandma claimed, came from following the teachings of Jesus. “Jesus told us to take care of the ‘least among us,’” Gran explained, caressing the words in finger quotes. “Meaning anyone less fortunate than we are or, experiencing trouble of some kind.” All of which helped young Isabelle better understand why her family did things for people—some who didn’t deserve it.

The first “least one” Isabelle remembers to this day, her (fully deserving) second-grade teacher, age-forced to retire. No problem: Mother put her on the bakery payroll, even though Mrs. M had little aptitude for dealing with bakery pans or customers.

Another case, the “poor” (undeserving) family who lived in the “unfinished” house on the road to her grandparents’ farm. Limitless grocery for starters. Only to be followed by her parents paying for all their doctor’s appointments, the kids’ glasses, braces for their crooked teeth—whatever they needed.

“They’re taking advantage of you!” Isabelle railed at her mother on more than one occasion. Extending her complaint with the likes of “They’re coarse and uncouth.” (She’d learned that somewhere, she thought defensively.) “They don’t brush their teeth!” and “They’ll spit their medicine in the creek.” To which Mother would sigh, and calmly reply, “But by the grace of God, Izzie…” To which Isabelle couldn’t help but fire back with some inane version of “No! But by the grace of you!”

Isabelle gives her head a shake, blows out a breath, wondering where in hell all that came from, while trying not to think what a snot she could be back then.

She plucks the long-stemmed lighter from the jar of pens, stares at the flame for a moment before applying it to the wick of the candle at the edge of her desk. Too easy to forget the many times Isabelle herself reaped doses of that grace—from her years as an intolerable teen to her decades as an intolerant adult.

One of the most humbling has stalked Isabelle into adulthood: Junior year, undergrad, Duquesne U, middle of a Sunday morning—when Mother should be in church! But there she was, her cinnamon-laced scent wafting into the rec room like an advert for college-dorm brunch, hands laden with goodies—only to find her daughter sprawled on a chair in front of the TV, a long, thin cigarette poised in her long, thin fingers.

Without missing a beat, up went Isabelle’s hand in “gleeful” greeting, the covert indulgence launched overhead to the rear of the room, where a potted umbrella plant snuffed it in a puff of smoke.

Delighted at Isabelle’s pals enjoying her sauerkraut and sourdough bread, Mother left them each with a hug and chocolate chip cookie, her smile never wavering as she turned her head of frothed-coffee curls to flag a hand from the parking lot outside the room’s sky-high windows—Isabelle already envisioning her mother cruising toward home, hand ready on the horn for any brainless business. “The actual, safety-enhancing purpose of a horn,” she informed passenger Isabelle, the first time she witnessed this jaw-dropping performance—entered in her diary as moderate mom = covert road rager.  The tally soon llll.

Then, sure enough, the letter, in Mother’s precise longhand: No daughter of ours should be caught smoking. (Isabelle’s take: “should be caught” being the operative phrase). It may seem a cool trend, but like most, must end (intentional rhyme? Isabelle had the nerve to snigger). It’s ill-mannered, unladylike, and unhealthy (Isabelle pictured her mother’s Rose-Silk lips enunciating each adjective.) Worse yet, it’s unfair and disrespectful to throw our hard-earned money at such a disgusting behavior.

The disgusting hit home like a glass-slammed bird: when had her mother ever used that mortifying word—aimed at her!

She pulls her feet onto the chair, presses her forehead to her knees, closes her eyes.

A crow cackles in the tree nearest the window. She unfolds slowly, peers out to where the pin oaks bleed together, blinks against the light that seeps between their arms. Across the street, the lamp above the stoop is still on, the bentwood rocking chair swaying in the breeze.

Now suddenly, even as she’s gazing at it, the light over the stoop flicks off, casting the abandoned chair into shadow, where it will remain until the sun climbs over the roof.

There is no way to meet her deadline now, the extension come and gone. The hardest part of it, not just telling her editor (perpetually appreciative of Isabelle’s every effort), that she—this altered version of herself—could not care less. That nothing she could ever write or edit or even think would actually matter—that what matters defies the frail art of words.

She shifts her gaze to the photograph on the wall next to the clock. That lovely face. Those lively eyes. “Butterfly eyes,” Isabelle’s father called those dancing orbs, framed by the fringe of lashes she’d flutter at him every time he said it.

Three months it has taken Isabelle to reinstate the portrait to its rightful place, here in her office: her mother’s favorite room in “Isabelle’s old burb home,” as she was fond of calling it. The home where, having little choice at that point—the “full plates” of Isabelle’s brother and sister overflowing with careers and soccer games and vacations—their mother finally agreed to come live with her younger daughter: the arrangement based on the promise (of which the busy siblings were to know nothing) wrung from Isabelle yet again. As it was on that dreadful day of the diagnosis, rendering Isabelle speechless, the wall of language that usually stood guard between her and the maddening world reduced to rubble by the blow of those few words.

Three tormented months it has taken Isabelle to open the drawer of her mother’s armoire; where, alone again on that appalling funeral day, she secluded the photo, wrapped in the delicate satin pillowcases over which she labored so diligently, their gossamer solace her feeble attempt to comfort the ravaged body as it worked to be free—

Only to culminate in that awful moment when they knew, she and her mother, felt it as clearly as the tremor that rattled her mother’s body; the worthless oxygen tank stationed between them at the kitchen table, like an inept servant, leaving Isabelle no recourse but to answer those earnest eyes with her impossible promise.

“There is no greater blessing than a peaceful death,” her mother often reminded her. “And if our Lord doesn’t see fit to provide—” Her eyes never left Isabelle’s, her face drawn with misery and hope. “It’s the one hard thing I ask of you.”

How could she keep such a promise? Yet how could she not? All that her parents—her beloved, indulgent mother!—had given her—and what had she ever asked of Isabelle in return?

Except to be the special person her mother deemed her to be.

 “You are special,” her mother felt compelled to inform her suddenly independent nine-year-old. “Special means not common.” She looked at Isabelle intently, to see if she was following, checking for the ready comprehension she expected. “Arrogance is common. Hate is common. Cursing is common.” In her mother’s context, common took on a stunningly negative effect. “Lying is common,” she continued, punctuating each word. “Half truths and omissions the most devious.” She paused for emphasis, eyes fixed on Isabelle. “Once you lie—or fail to keep a promise—nothing you say or do will be trusted.”

Mother made such claims as if each were unquestionable, its integrity rooted in a rock-hard evidence. “No judgment here, darling. Just stating obvious fact” (this was back when facts were still taken as reality).

You are in the world, not of the world.” Another fact of which Mother would often remind her “special” daughter.

Regardless, in Isabelle’s mind, special was a lot to live up to—which she mostly failed to do, she’d think, once she’d grown the brain cells for that most-troublesome skill of self-reflection.

How effortless it’s all been for Isabelle’s siblings, having shared their tears and promises, in a rush to retreat to their worlds. 

Still, to be fair, she, too, could have been a better daughter. All those days, weeks, months—years—she’s taken for granted, her mother’s constancy sacrificed to the trivial mania of life: too busy with work, with play, with deadlines and dates—with everything but what mattered.

Then the endless remorse, another punishment conjured from the Devil’s black soul, as worthless an emotion as guilt or fear or hate—

The ordeals she put her mother through, common sense seared by a fire of anger and confusion, running from the newspaper on her break “to check on things”—how could she ever have left her mother alone! Positioning her at the sink to wash dishes, for gods’ sakes, the cruel steam stifling breath. Persuading her onto the street, thinking a cool spring walk might be uplifting—only to retreat from the unforeseen wind gusting her mother’s tortured face.

The damnable drive to the park for a picnic. (Christ alive! Mother could hardly breathe, let alone swallow a chicken finger!)

And for what purpose for Chrissake? Whose goddamn purpose? Every damn bit of that idiocy—all done in an effort for normalcy? As if trying to make things go on as normal, pretending they could ever be normal again—a cruelty in itself.

Then the evening Mother was relegated to her bedroom, to give her some privacy—more honestly, to protect her from the decadent cocktails and cigarettes Isabelle and Seth planned to indulge in, trying to capture some bit of normalcy for themselves before he left.

The why did I? and if only as mind-wrecking as a gun to the head.

You think too much, chides her father’s doting voice in her head.

Isabelle slams her feet to the floor, takes a slurp of cold coffee. She won’t do tears. She’s never done tears. Not even as a child. She does anger. She has, in fact, collected a litany of terms for the word.

She doesn’t remember her mother ever crying—her talent for moderating emotion unbounded. It stayed her, defying the anguish that would bring others to their knees.

Some deep part of Isabelle clings to that aptitude for surviving “life’s slings and arrows,” as Mother called them.

So.

For all her scenes of emotive idiocy, Isabelle has other scenes, too.

That first summer after grad school, when they went to the beach together. Ocean City, with its boardwalk and honky-tonk; the early morning “light bites” of scrambled eggs and coffee, the café suppers of fish and salad, followed by strolls on the boardwalk, the innocent glee of a mom and daughter on holiday together.

And through it all, not a remark on how frustrated-driver Isabelle, for the first time in her life, lit a cigarette in the presence of her mother; not a single sign her mother noticed her daughter’s braless chest poking the flimsy gauze shirts she wore back then; not a syllable of reproach regarding the butt-baring bikini she flaunted on the beach.

Their Saturday shopping trips, after Mother’s 2 AM startup of her bakers, followed by her ritual “energizing” twenty-minute nap, so she could “spend the day with my daughter,” she’d tell her baking crew and anyone who happened to be in the store, as if bragging about a prize she’d won.

Easter and Mother’s Day trips to church (Isabelle’s small sacrifice), her mother’s joy overpowering the fragrance of the lilies, as she showed off “my daughter Isabelle” to the sanctimonious churchies.

The times they read to each other; Isabelle rubbing her mother’s swollen feet; the summer day she took her to Kaufman’s to get her hair done, sweet John the most delicate stylist in the universe; then picking out a trench coat from the hope-filled new arrivals rack.

In that glorious, indulgent life, her parents—her mother!—unwittingly failing to prepare her for the eventual possibility of being responsible for someone beside herself—and the overwhelming sense of being inadequate, incompetent, unsure of everything she said or did.

The best she could manage, it seemed, was trying to be present, to attend to her mother as the horrors multiplied; the word companionable taking on new and onerous depths.

But sweet Jesus! How are we supposed to know how to get from one stage to the next, to go from living to not living—let alone help someone else to do it?

Isabelle and her mother always told each other, they weren’t afraid of dying; they just didn’t want it to hurt.

“But what decides the time to die? Not this vile disease, that’s for sure.” This she said one day at lunch when the disease had not yet bared its fangs to reveal the pernicious evil it held. “What’s a body anyway, except housing for the soul.” She tapped her spoon on the edge of her salad plate to punctuate her point.

At times like these, Isabelle could hear her brain running its mouth in her head, clamped her mouth shut.

“Transit system for the mind,” her mother added like a droll aside—an observation, like several others, that would distress Isabelle in an unforeseen way—

Not unlike her mother’s self-admitted “incontestable” position on the God to whom she was so faithful—that supposed loving and generous God, who saw fit to deny His most loyal supplicant even that one reward. The base brutality, the perverse power of a deity, reducing such an exceptional being to a withered stranger right before her own acutely aware eyes.

Most unbearable of all, a persecution repeating on an endless loop: Isabelle’s failure to acknowledge that “Lord and Savior”—the unspoken heartbreak of a mother unable to persuade her daughter to see the light, to save her soul, to meet her in heaven—

Train up a child in the way… Why didn’t the training take with Isabelle? Why did she choose rebellion instead? Did the churchies do it to her? Or just the bedeviling idea that Mother Earth is God, that reincarnation makes more sense than any other myth. If only it were possible to edit those convictions to fit into her mother’s.

Yet, how peace-giving to believe in that heavenly afterlife, its  palaces and streets of gold—scriptural metaphor for a place of no pain or sorrow, a place where you’d be with your loved ones again.

But it defied logic. Besides, how could you know who truly believed, who pretended to just in case?

And what help was anything the minister had to say that day, his imperious pontification failing to connect even remotely to anything of this universe, let alone to the divine soul of his supposed tribute.

 For half an hour he rattled on in his mythical muddle, Isabelle barely able to contain herself, as she reflected on his visits to the hospital room where her mother lay captive to the interminable testing: yet another opportunity whereby this “man of God” chose to administer to the most loyal of his flock by guiding her tremulous hand over an embarrassment  of checks—a fact infuriatingly compounded by the additional dozen discovered by Isabelle in the weeks following the funeral, as she searched her mother’s Bible for passages that might offer some small peace.

There, tucked into the fine onionskin pages of that sacred tome, stood the awful evidence, secreted away by a mother who anticipated her daughter’s dissent. A mother, who, in defiance of her own edict, hid this vile business from Isabelle—the deceit doubly insufferable for the secret thousands gifted to his “mission” in her will. 

But then… These offerings were from her heart …What else would this faithful servant feel she had to offer her beloved God, once she…

Beyond the unbearable betrayal, how would she possibly not expect Isabelle to understand all this, to realize…?

The ultimate question still bedeviling Isabelle, as she looks to the photo again: how a wise woman of such intellect and insight would not see through a charlatan treading so vile a vortex of snake oil as Preacher Bob.

Cast not your pearls before swine, her mother often admonished her daughter, usually in reference to whomever Isabelle was dating at the time. Words Mother herself would have done well to heed, Isabelle often thought, seldom without bitterness. The meek shall inherit the earth, another gentle chide for her “high-minded” daughter—

“Unless Preacher Bob gets there first,” Isabelle mutters to the oppressive air of the office and pivots the chair toward the window.

The light on the street seems weird now. Different somehow from when she took Himmel for his walk an hour ago. The early morning gray remains, an opaque film over everything, but an odd illumination casts a pallor on the face of the house across the street, making the tidy lines of color around its windows appear to quiver and glow like waning neon lights.

The weather threatened the day of the funeral, too. But the wind came up, abrupt and strong, the sky parting like the Red Sea itself for the masses who came. Hour upon hour the mourners arrived, shielding their eyes against the heartless gaiety of the sudden sun, their faces shadowed by fear, by disbelief, by relief that it was their friend—not any one of them—the minister would eulogize that day.

Seemingly everyone her mother’s life could have touched: business people, bakery staff, customers, neighbors—and, of course, the churchies.

 The longer Isabelle lived, the more confounded she became as to how her mother could tolerate them, let alone think she fit into their clan.

Yet, ever loyal, Mother continued to teach her Sunday school class, played the piano for the four services they held each week, prayed along with the judgmental hypocrites.

If only they would focus on the teachings of Jesus, instead of judging the world’s transgressors. Be more like her mother. Who was, ironically, too kind, too much of the time—a repeating theme Mother had to be weary of hearing.

 “People don’t appreciate you!” she almost shouted at her mother one night. When she revisited this particular scene, she remembered it happening in their kitchen, over cookies and milk, after another Wednesday prayer meeting—during which Isabelle tried to study for her 7^th grade algebra test the next day.

“You are too nice,” she spouted in frustration, slamming a chocolate chip into her mug of milk. “People take advantage—

To which her mother made the uncustomary move of interrupting. She held up a finger, pulled a deep breath, said to (the spoiled idiot who was) her daughter, “In that you are wrong.” Those blue orbs riveted Isabelle’s, a sternness in her voice Isabelle hadn’t heard before. “You can never be too kind.” She huffed out a breath. “Some people mistake kindness for weakness. But that’s stu—” Yes, she almost said the S word, a “lowbrow” term never to be used on anyone—based on the baffling idea that everyone was “created in God’s image” (a way overcrowded club to Isabelle’s way of thinking).

“Being unkind is not only misguided—” Mother sat back, lifted her chin—“it’s base and common” (that shameful word, again!). “So, darling. Be kind to everyone you can”—another thoughtful pause, intensifying the electricity of the air between them. “But, if they don’t respect your intent” (another near rhyme, Isabelle would again realize later)—“don’t take any guff.”

She could tell by the way Mother said it, that guff meant the same as her father’s bullshit; and thinking: man, if anyone ever picked on her, she sure as hell wanted Mother on her team, that bring-it-on gleam in her eyes when someone tried to down an underdog.

Big on underdogs for sure, her mother was.

No wonder she was so big on JC—the metaphor for the underdog trope. Mother, Jesus, Atticus Finch: “A breed apart,” as her dad would say.

When Isabelle shared these thoughts from her teenage journal, Mother’s smile blossomed. “My own personal Jane Eyre,” she said, an appreciative lilt in her tone. She placed a warm hand over Isabelle’s, widened her eyes. “Some people just haven’t read enough books,” she said. “I’d say enough good books, but that would be a bit judgmental.

By their fruits shall you know them, Isabelle would retort in her diary; also noting Maya Angelou’s more up-to-date version: When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.

A siren cut down the street, sending Isabelle back to the funeral. She takes a breath, revisited the throng, trying not to think that, in their disbelief, they were right: that of all the discontented people, the mean-spirited or basely evil—even among the so-called “brothers and sisters of the Lord”—her mother was the one He chose to rip from life.

Against their scrutiny, Isabelle hardened her heart. Against their pity, their piety, their stricken faces that told Isabelle what they couldn’t say, their voices vague and tight, as they struggled with the expected expressions, the condolences a kind of suffering all its own.

Yet in all fairness, what else could they say? What words could they possibly hope for that would make any difference? Life, as they say, moves on.

Isabelle thumps the mug onto the desk, banishes the scene. She, too, needs to move on, focus on matters at hand, like the articles she should be editing. She leans in to look along the opposite side of the street toward the corner, where she should have taken the 10:40 bus into town, her work tucked into her briefcase.

But now it’s the wind she registers, that unsettling moan it conjures as it approaches her hill-top street. At the horizon, the sky seems to boil, tentacles of lightning exploding spasms of light that halo everything, wane a beat, then flare again, as if on some mystical timer.

A cannon shot of thunder rumbles through the stony spine of the old house. Behind Isabelle, the lamp flicks off. The computer winces; and in the same instant, like a synchronized pulse, the outstretched limbs of the oaks lift like the arms of some immense beasts and hurl themselves against the window, clawing at the glass as though fighting to get in.

Isabelle jerks back, the candle slamming the edge of the desk. In the next breath, she leaps from the chair, snuffs the smoking wick with a sheet of coffee-soaked paper and jams the clump into the pocket of her jeans, then bolts from the office and down the stairs to the back of the house, where for some odd reason, she always feels safer.

At the high arch between the kitchen and sunroom, she collides with Himmel, already on watch, the crown of his head gathered into a pouch of wrinkles, as he peers at the yard beyond the wall of windows.

The sunroom shudders. The windows ping. Amist of jasmine releases from the pot in the corner of the sunroom.

Isabelle says the dog’s name, shuffles him to the other side of the arch, presses herself into the kitchen wall.

Columns of rain push across the yard now, punishing the garden with shards of water. The sky enshrouds the sunroom, pummels knuckles of water at the glass on three sides of the room, the air so green and electric Isabelle can taste it.

She pulls further back inside the arch, Himmel at her side. Each time the lightning strikes the earth and thunders up through the house, the hound pushes his nose into the cup of Isabelle’s hand, licking the salty moisture of her palm.

Then stunningly, as quickly as the storm struck, the wind shifts, scudding the clouds toward the city as though suddenly summoned there.

Isabelle rests a hand on the dog’s head, pulls a breath. Tentative, she slides back the glass door, steps onto the porch—into the devastation. The swing still sways unnaturally from side to side. Dark spots mark wounds in the wicker where it has beat itself against a post of the rail, gouging out clots of its own white flesh. The smaller of the two wicker rockers has vaulted across the porch, its back-rocker panel caught by the bottom plank of the banister.

On the floor, bougainvillea and begonias lie overturned, their roots abandoned by the soil strewn about them. The tiny succulents Isabelle thought she tucked so securely into a large clay saucer appear to have been plucked out, one by one, and flung randomly into the earthy debris.

At the edge of the porch, the young bloodgood sags, its branches humbled, the veined undersides of its leaves turned up like the palms of a thousand penitent children. In the flowerbed to its right, carnations, gladiolas, and foxglove lie broken, surrounded by flattened pansies and black-eyed Susans, their innocent faces turned up toward the newly blue sky, too late to save them.  

Isabelle refuses to look any farther, turns back toward the porch, where Himmel is fussing at the door. As she approaches, she sees the object of the dog’s agitation, an elegant butterfly anchored by its rain-dazed wings to the door’s splattered glass. A blue morpho, Isabelle marvels, transfixed by the spots on its wings. In this part of the world? A remarkable anomaly.

Cautiously, she crouches next to the dog, realizes instantly that the closer she draws her face to the creature, the harder its legs work against the slick glass that holds it fast.

She has to do something. Quick.

“Down,” she commands the dog; and returning with the magnifier from her workbench at the other end of the porch, she crouches again, raises the glass between her face and the creature.

Tweezers, too risky, she thinks, their prongs too thick. She needs something more refined. Something thin, sharp edged. And she needs it fast: The wings are already drying, adhering to the window. If only she could wedge her fingernail… If only the creature would stay still.

She feels queasy, tightens her stomach against it. She has no muscle memory for this.

She blows out a breath, pumps her right hand, open, closed, open, closed. A line of sweat slides between her breasts. She swallows, feels the muscles in her neck tighten against the pulse that thrums through her arms.

Ever so slowly, she leans forward, commands herself to focus away from the butterfly’s crazed eyes. But through the horrible magic of the glass, the terror of the creature leaps out at her; and defying her will, the magnifier jerks forward.

Powerless, she watches as misguided instinct drives its legs—until the maniacal body has ripped free of one of its anchored wings.

She lowers the glass, collapses onto her haunches, draws back her arm to propel the tool into the yard. With the tail of her shirt, she swipes the sweat from her lip, slumps forward, buries her face in her hands.

She cannot do this. Not this too.

But when she raises her face to the tortured butterfly, she knows what has to be done. Rising to her knees, she pulls the broken candle in its mass of damp paper from her pocket. Through glazed eyes, she watches her hand, like some detached but capable machine, as she puts aside the candle, crumples the coffee-stained sheet into the thick, loose wad that will press the struggling creature into peace.

The eerie light that ushered in this tempestuous day is no more, its role complete. Now it’s the west-facing sky of the backyard that’s taken over, the ethereal orb beyond the crest of the house, falling over Isabelle’s shoulders, as she sits cross-legged on the porch. Her limp hands still cradle the paper, her gaze fixed on the dreamy eyespot of the butterfly’s remaining wing, still attached by its tattered edge to the sunroom’s glass door, as it lifts and quivers in the breeze.

Faithful Himmel, having settled in next to Isabelle, rests his muzzle in the comforting pocket of her lap, his sweet, doleful eyes shifting between her face and the door. Every so often, he lifts his head as if listening for the familiar voice, the sound of it wrapped around Isabelle’s name like a gift.

But it’s only the doves the hound hears, murmuring their assurances from the exhausted arms of the bloodgood, as he nuzzles the hollow of his companion’s neck, her eyes tight against the stream that has found its way, finally, down her cheeks, into the collar of her shirt.

Into the evening, the trusty hound stays with her, drowsing in the falling light and bittersweet air of the after-storm, attuned to the birds at the feeder, the sound of their wings like delicate satin pillowcases fluttering in the wind.

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