Aggie stood at the kitchen door and watched her neighbour’s dog running through the long, windy grass. The pain had stalled – for now – and she could stand on both legs without the usual angst. Under her soles the hard oak was cool and comfortable and she unclenched her toes. The dog jumped, bark-laughed the way dogs do, and spun around and around; her neighbour, a thin smiling shadow in the distance, threw the ball from her porch and the dog gambolled again up and over the grass, invisible one minute, its tail and wagging tongue and wet brown eyes shimmering the next.
Aggie leaned forward, following the young dog’s path; in the heavy yellow sunlight she’d been struck with a long-forgotten memory. A puppy she’d once owned, the same coarse gold hair, the same blithe movements; an angel prancing in that same acre of gossamer blue-green kangaroo grass. She hadn’t thought of the puppy in a lifetime; had forgotten its name. Angel, she suddenly recalled.
Sharpness slit her thigh like a knife. She cried out, grasping the doorframe and jerking the weight from her left leg.
‘Get that dog out of my yard!’ she yelled.
The neighbour stopped smiling, her arm, holding the ball high, frozen above her head. ‘Sorry, love,’ she shouted, and whistled to the dog. Then: ‘You okay? How’s the leg?’
Aggie slammed the screen door. Time to cook, clean, write another letter to council complaining of the constant trespassing on her land. But the oven wouldn’t warm fast enough, the tea tasted like damp soil, she couldn’t find the duster. She threw the dishcloth down and peered through the window, checking the dog no longer bounded through her yard. The wind softly breathed the grass in waves, golden and diaphanous; for years that had been enough to lull her, but today, with the dog now gone, it was a swathe of emptiness.
Abruptly, inexplicably, she was awash in loneliness; the clock ticked too loudly; cobwebs rattled in the remote corners. Perhaps she could ring her neighbour, invite her to tea; ask her to bring her dog. But when was the last time she’d had anyone in the house?
Not since her husband had moved out; not since he’d knocked her down, since she’d spent a night in hospital with her leg bound; not since she’d been the talk of the neighbourhood. How many years ago was that?
Crossing her arms she sank too quickly into her rocking chair. The pain shot along her femur again and she closed her eyes. After a spell it relented; instead of searching for the painkillers she remained in the chair and dragged the old photo album, ignored by her for an eternity, from the drawer beside her.
Blowing the dust from its cover she searched its earliest pages. Photos of her parents, of the house painted a rainbow of different colours, of the yard beyond the first few metres forever grassy and amorphous. Some things never change. Her ten-year-old smile was vast in a picture of her hugging the puppy, its creamy fur as flaxen as the neighbour’s dog.
The neighbour’s dog. The ache she felt to hear it bark, to watch it galloping through the kangaroo grass in its enviable world, devoid of cares, cut deeper than the pain in her thigh.
She rested her skull against the chair’s wooden head, her eyes shut tight; then picked up her address book and searched for her neighbour’s phone number.
Photo by perrin o’hagan on Unsplash
