A short story by Joe Broadmeadow
The dream always started the same way — not with darkness or that strange liquid feeling of falling, but with the smell of cut grass and something warm pressing against his leg.
Michael Caruso was fifty-three years old, and he was dreaming of a golden retriever named Biscuit.
In the dream, he was sitting on the back steps of the house he grew up in on Harriet Lane, the one with the peeling white paint and the gate that never quite latched. The August sun was low and lazy. He was two years old, though somehow he could think and speak like a man, and Biscuit, all floppy ears and ridiculous paws, was climbing into his lap with the total conviction that he was a much smaller dog than he was.
“You always did think you were a Chihuahua,” Michael said.
Biscuit looked up at him with those amber eyes, the ones that had never once held a single complicated thought, and huffed a warm breath against his chin.
“You always let me,” the dog said. Not in words exactly — more like a feeling that arrived fully formed, the way music sometimes lands before you’ve heard a single note. “That’s how I knew you were mine.”
They were walking now, the way dreams pivot without apology. The neighborhood unspooled around them. The same cracked sidewalk, the elm tree with the hollow that Michael had convinced himself a family of foxes lived in, the corner store that smelled like pickles and newsprint. Biscuit trotted ahead with that loose, rolling gait, checking back every few steps to make sure Michael was still there.
“Remember this?” the dog asked, stopping at the base of the elm.
Michael laughed. He was eight years old now, for no particular reason. “You treed Mrs. Petrocelli’s cat up there. She didn’t talk to Mom for three weeks.”
“The cat was asking for it.”
“The cat was sleeping.”
“Loudly,” Biscuit said, with great dignity.
They walked through years the way you walk through rooms. The dog retrieving a tennis ball from the Murphy’s pool and then shaking himself dry against Michael’s father’s dress trousers. It all came back. The look on his father’s face, the way it cracked from fury to helpless laughter in the span of a second. The winter Michael had mono and Biscuit stationed himself at the foot of the bed for eleven straight days, immovable as a gargoyle, getting up only to eat and then returning to his post with the seriousness of a soldier. Biscuit riding shotgun on the drive to Michael’s first high school dance, hanging his head out the window, ears flat, gloriously unbothered by the whole human ritual of it.
“You smelled like too much cologne,” Biscuit observed.
“I was fifteen.”
“The pigeons could smell you from two blocks away.”
“Are you always going to be like this?”
“I’m a dream. I’m exactly the way you remember me.”
They were in the backyard again now. The light had gone amber, the kind that doesn’t belong to any particular season, and Michael was an adult, and he knew, the way you know things in dreams without being told, that this was the last part.
Biscuit sat down in the grass and looked at him steadily.
Michael sat beside him. The old dog’s muzzle was white now, his movements slower, his eyes still kind but softer, like light through gauze. Sixteen years had passed in the span of an August afternoon.
“I’ve never stopped feeling bad about it,” Michael said. His voice came out rougher than he intended. “About the end. Whether you were scared. Whether you knew. Whether I should have…”
“Michael.”
“I keep thinking there was something else I could have done.”
“Michael…” The feeling came warmer this time, patient as a hand on a shoulder. “Do you remember the day you brought home the rubber duck?”
He blinked. “What?”
“The yellow rubber duck. From the fair. You must have been ten. You won it at the ring toss and you ran home and squeaked it at me for twenty minutes straight. I chewed the squeaker out in forty-five seconds.”
“You were so proud of yourself.”
“It was a triumph.” A pause. “Do you remember the morning you left for college? How I sat at the front window for a week?”
“Mom told me. I cried on the highway for an hour on the way home for…for, ah,” the words caught in his throat.
“For me. That’s love, you know. That’s the whole thing right there — the rubber duck and the crying on the highway. The eleven days when you were sick. Every walk. Every ridiculous game of fetch you let go on too long because you could see I was still happy. That’s what sixteen years is. Not the last day. Sixteen years of the yellow duck.”
Michael didn’t say anything. The amber light held.
“You sat with me,” Biscuit said quietly. “At the end, you didn’t look away. You held my head in your hands, and you talked to me and the last thing I knew in this world was your voice.” A beat. “That’s not something to be sorry for. That’s the kindest thing one creature can do for another.”
“I should have had more time,” Michael said.
“Everybody says that. The dog nudged him with his nose. Nobody ever gets more time. That’s the whole trick of it. You only ever get what you’re living right now.”
The dream began to thin. The amber light softened toward white.
“I’m going to miss you,” Michael said, though it came out strangely, present tense, as if he hadn’t been missing him for thirty years already.
“You haven’t missed me,” Biscuit said, and there was a warmth in it that had no sorrow in it at all. “You’ve carried me. That’s different. I’ve been with you the whole time.”
The dog stood, shook himself once with that full-body shimmy that had always made Michael laugh, and turned to trot away across the grass in the direction of the light.
He looked back once, nodded in a way only dogs can, and walked on.
The warmth of the words had one last message. “Go live, Michael. Living is the whole point.”
Michael Caruso woke at 6:14 on a Tuesday morning in October, sunlight coming sideways through the curtains, his chest full of something he couldn’t quite name. Not grief exactly, not relief, but something in the space between them, warm and quietly certain.
He lay there for a while. Then he got up, put on the coffee, and stood at the kitchen window watching the yard.
He stayed there longer than necessary.
It was nice, just watching.
— the end —
