Doren Robbins
The Dog's Robe
Then that same dog (the daughter's dog that we took care of), the dog who was her speechless security and willing nighttime prisoner ages 5-7 when she went to sleep after reading, sometimes troubled after reading, not just troubled because reading simply ended, and the dog helped me, strutting into the room dragging a robe that he inherited from me, that old robe before Linda J. bought the one I still wear. Sometimes he slept on it in the den, and at night when the troubled ending of reading would happen he would come in, knowingly it appeared, it also appeared that he too just didn't want to be alone out there, and he came in dragging his robe, and she stroked his muzzle with the white streak, she liked to trace the white streak with her fingers.
He slept on that robe all the time. No problem for him, sleep. Eight years after that time when he was at the end, about a year after I stopped working for Nix, I held him in the back seat of the car and carried him in to the vet wrapped in that robe he always loved because we intentionally placed it down where he slept after we made love on it so he would always have our smell. And all of our smells—mine, Linda's, and Samantha's from the time when we used to swing her in that robe—went in together to the vet with that dog with the white streak by his nose and the white star at the center above his eyes, it went in with his final smell of bloody diabetic spit, and his final look of a dog's full eyes, his almost permeable eyes, rolling shut, not so differently as when they widened open when he first looked at a spare rib bone I gave him, when he did that the first time we saw him hiding under a truck, and when he first looked at the robe—and looked back at us—and looked—and then smelled it like he did that pig's rib—and then lay down smelling our euphoric scent, and rubbed it with his nose, his eyes barely open, and went to sleep again, making a slight cry with his breath coming out on the womb of cloth and fragrance we gave him.
Copyright (C) Doren Robbins, 2006. All rights reserved.