Let It Stay

The sky was as blue as a cornflower marble, wisps of cirrus clouds high in the ceiling, and there were no vapor trails, no intruding airplanes. There were only hawks up there, and Jinx, sky-aware as always, sat with me and watched them in their fixed-wing thermal soarings.

We were in the cemetery grass, and it was warm and soft there in the green, on the carpet that covers the sleeping remains of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. The carved and lettered stones stood around us as if watching, and they were speaking, though not in voices a waking man can hear.

I watched Jinx as he watched the hawks, and I marveled again at the bond between us. I stroked his spotted back, watching the coarse hairs come loose and float into the autumn air, watching his eyes, his smile, his twitching nose. He threw himself down and wallowed in the solar shine, yipping and luxuriating, then biting his own leg as his good sense floated away like the hairs I’d loosened.

Just now. Let it stay like it is just now. 

But He said, “No.”

I think the dog heard Him, because he sat up and peered into my face, peered through the sunshine, through the motes of dust hanging there.

And like the closing hymn in a church service, Jinx’s short bark told me that it was over and that it was time to go home. We walked down the hill together, and the dog stood and waited for me to open the gate. I closed it behind us with a click, and I turned with the dog, and we moved to the gravel road, where bright dust and rock showed us the way back to the house.

~ S.K. Orr