Pink Ochre Magazine

        I remember the air.
        Gently breezing through the trees, rustling leaves as it went. It was warm. And the sun,
shining down against a cloudless sky. Shadows rested upon the grass as if a blanket, tucking in
the family dog, Beast, one of a pair of Rottweilers. Normally a blur, an untamed bundle of
energy and life, he was lying in the shade, panting. Rapid. Shallow. It was warm. Not warm
enough, but it was warm. The streets were empty—neighborhood parked cars, the only real
outside presence. The houses were silent. The windows closed. But Beast was panting. My
mother, frustrated from her shift, exhausted in her uniform, stood next to me, one hand holding
the porch railing, the other a manilla envelope. Tears smeared her makeup.
        I wasn’t getting it.
        That much was clear.

                                                                                                                  I remember the rain.
Storms on the highway. Rain falling with no end. Windshield wipers bouncing back and forth. It
was 2004. I was nine. My sister and I, seated in the back of the family suburban. My mom,
navigating us through a poorly kept highway, flashing “men at work” signs visible with every
pump of the breaks. She could barely see out the windshield herself. She’d been complaining
about it every time my focus broke from Dark Duel Stories —the game I’d spent the drive
playing. My sister, headphones on, listening to whatever it was that teens were listening to at this point, swapped intermittently between gazing out the window and writing something in the
journal she kept.
We were returning from some family gathering states away. I don’t remember what. A
birthday, maybe? A graduation? It doesn’t matter. The family got overshadowed. After an
accident down the highway turned the traffic to gridlock, my mom, tired, six hours into an eight-
hour drive, turned the music down. She waved her hand. Got our attention. Her words rambled
for a second, eyes jumping back and forth from the road to each of her children in the rear-view
mirror, not quite knowing how to handle it. Then she said it: Beauty, the family dog, one of a
pair of Rottweilers, was going to die.

        He was my best friend.
        And I was lost.
        A seven-year-old kid. A sea of medical jargon. A black sheet held up to the light. Faded
clouds spreading, like ink into water, all over the white of a skeleton. Bones changing. Growing. Shrinking. It was all the same, in a way. His paws were lumpy. His chest a loose map of grooves and divots. He laid down a lot more. Watched instead of played. The black sheet, a thing burdened with truth, disappeared back into the envelope. It was not seen again.
        “Cancer’s eating his bones,” she said, crying —he was her dog too.
        “Like Pac-Man eats the pellets?”

She was my best friend.
And I was lost.
Again.
A nine-year-old boy. A battering storm. A little box of wires and cards in my hands. The
reverberation of a memory, one I’d spent years screaming to the ceiling about, finally coming
home. Beauty was slower. She didn’t play as much. She barely ate. I remember telling myself
she was just tired. After all, with a life so full, spent playing in the yard, chasing one another
around, standing guard at night, she was bound to lead quieter years when all the dust settled.
And maybe she just missed her brother?
I know I did.
But I just didn’t want to see it.
Not again.
I vanished in the car. My duel surrendered. Defeat scrawled along the screen. Running, in the
only way I could, I melted into a daydream, hoping against hope into a cartoon lab. Bubbling
beakers and test tubes lining the tables. Whirring computers printing sheets upon sheets of
formulas and shapes. Steam fogging goggles hard at work over a cauldron labeled, “dog cure”.
An errant shoulder hits a beaker, breaking it into the cauldron. Explosion. Hard cut to: “Breaking
News: No More Dead Dogs!”
Trumpets.
I melted for hours.
Months, maybe.

        I thought of the ball he liked, and how he chased it in the sun.

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        I thought of the naps we’d take, cuddled in her bed.

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As a kid, I always thought death, and everything that followed it, was something…outside. It
existed on the periphery —isolated to Toonami’s action block and dad’s old war movies. Blood
was black and white. Collect enough orange stones and anyone could be wished back. It wasn’t
real. It never got inside. It never made a plate and sat at the table asking to pass the salt.

But then it did.

It showed up, moved in, then started eating Beast —slowly, and over the course of months.
Everything Beast did, or watched us do, it followed alongside him, drafting a copy of his coat to share. Then one day, I pet Beast, told him I loved him, and went to school. He wasn’t there when

I came home.

Eventually I made peace with that.
Or at least I thought I did.
But it was different with Beauty.
Death never left.

So, one day, when it ate all of Beast that it could, suddenly she was on the plate, and bite by bite,
she vanished too —slowly, and over the course of months. And it wasn’t that we didn’t notice. It
wasn’t that she wasn’t loved. We did. She was. It was that, once it started, it never stopped
eating. Every day a bite. Every second spent chewing. All the while, we sat. We watched. No
one could help. No pills or “dog cure” would stop the plate from being set.

Once it’s there, it never leaves.

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