Passage-3
607 Words
AS I SWIM UP FROM DARKNESS into the goldenrod, I heave a dry sob. It’s that moment when you realize all has changed, and as bewildered as I am to be in a vast field buzzing with thousands of bees, I’m more undone at the death of my dog. How I know he’s dead and not just injured, I’m not sure, but the knowledge of it is bitter and absolute.
I’m standing in a yellow, undulating ocean of flowers tall enough to tickle my chin and reeds that sway gently from the bees’ ministrations. The bees tend to their business and leave me alone as I wade toward a clearing. And then I hear it, a whuff like a small chortle, a close-mouthed spontaneous note of excitement, and I think, Why not? He was here with me before.
“Arlen?” I enter the clearing.
He bursts through the remaining layer of plants and jumps up to put his paws on my shoulders as I crouch to hug him. The knowledge that he’s actually dead makes me cling to him with my face buried behind his ear, and he lets me for a long time. I smell the faint chocolate odor that tells me he’ll soon need a bath, and as I pull back to look at him, he gazes at me with an expression that needs no explanation. I kiss him roughly on the head.
For a while I do nothing but scratch the belly, he offers me. Then, “Come on, boy, let’s see where we are.”
The clearing is no more than the start of a path that’s just matted grass and maltreated soil. Gradually the path widens, swinging to the edge of the field, where the goldenrod rises on one side and a wooded area begins on the other. Arlen bounds ahead, only to run back to me as if to rush me along.
We walk a while, acutely aware of the orgy of pollination quivering through the flowers. The smell of dry grass and something vaguely like low tide simmers in the sunlight. I look down at my dog, whom I fed with an eye dropper when he was a puppy too young and runty to know how to eat on his own yet, and I’m happy in this illusion the brain is granting me.
The wooded area is soon replaced by marshland full of reeds that stretch even higher than the goldenrod. The funky odor that’s part mud, part rotten fish, intensifies.
And then I see it.
The first one.
Standing upright less than fifty feet away among the blanched stalks, it has the body of a man and the head of an emaciated lion, cheeks hollowed under glittering eyes that pin me as I halt in mid-step. Arlen’s dark, resonant snarl breaks my momentary paralysis and I swoop to pick him up and run back in the other direction just as the second one emerges from the goldenrod, eyes pulled tight in the wrinkled amber of its face. I notice the outline of ribs in its chest, each one a shadowed stripe. I weave away from it and stumble over the dirt path, Arlen clutched tightly. They’re behind me, very close, and I dive into the goldenrod just as Arlen leaps out of my arms and into the droning shimmer of tangled stems.
I crash through after him, upsetting the bees, their heavy bodies catapulting every which way. I’ve lost Arlen. Behind me the whipping and breaking of stems stop suddenly, and I hear a sound that cuts my heart: a high-pitched squeal, the whine of vivisection, then nothing. I wait for a second, then jump up and scream, “I’ll kill you!”
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- Writer
