To The Other Girl
This is a work of fiction. Other than references to public figures, any similarity to real persons living or dead, places, events or other material is coincidental and unintentional.
Cover photography credits Gudellaphoto, Fotolia.com; Boris Bushmin, Fotolia.com; cla77photos, Fotolia.com; pp76, Fotolia.com
Gyp
The dog had shepherd in him and, with his hindquarters canted toward the ground, this is probably why he ever learned to fly. Forever falling earthward likely inclined his mind to flight.
Or perhaps it was his master’s vocation that applied the downward tension allowing him to kite up into an evening sky, pulled and pushed aloft. His master was a carpenter whose work took the living wood spilling slowly up into the sky and set it sturdy into earthbound purpose. Or maybe it was the gravity of patient expectation, watching as his master labored with massive hands, the pulse visible in them, strong and steady, suddenly uncoiling, humming, slicing through the flesh as the woman he loved burned for another, and caught upon the musky breeze, floated, floated, screaming up a fiery kite into the night sky, shuddering against the wind and string, the tail finally bursting into flames. The cinders fell a light rain through open, rough-hewn, dreaming rafters.
But any of this could only account for metaphorical flight. And this dog flew in fact. His hindquarters angled toward the earth, his chest exposed, a strong wind had wished to lift him. Tired of patient expectation, he had let it.
The woman killed the baby. The dog had seen it, far below, her breath a different passion now in this night, the dirt shoveled out in raspy breaths, the moonlight turned over, again and again, by the spade. He had found the body later, conventionally, as would be expected of a dog. For a time, he refused to fly.
They executed the woman, and she was suspended in the sky, pushed and pulled, dead in her flight. The dog’s master had eventually married a female pastor long loved by his younger brother. The younger brother took up residence with his brother and sister-in-law, the wife he wanted. He never married.
Now this is the strange part. On Saturday nights after his master and his master’s brother had retired to their beds, the dog would join the lady pastor in front of the fire as she put the finishing touches on her sermon for the next day. Then they would walk outside and lean forward into the wind, however slight. The lightest breeze would lift them, and they would play out on an invisible tether, hover above the house built by the two men who slept below, beneath the rafters now holding up a heavy sky, too tired to dream. Smoke from the chimney spread a path of cinder softly falling like the lightest rain, a fragrance, a shadow seeping into the woods behind them. Then, their tether slipped, they would glide into the forest. Later they would walk out together, the dog pressed into the woman’s leg, her fingertips trailing down into his fur, walking into the dawn, his eyes aglow, her eyes patient expectation.