When an animal in the house becomes ready to die, suddenly you feel comfortable neither inside the house nor out in the yard.
When a dog, for example, that has lain under the kitchen table for 11 years as you sauteed onions or punched down dough or did your drunken Maria Callas impression (he sang along) has been marked for destruction yet still accepts a bit of liver from your hand or shoots you the identical glances that, through the years, asked the same untranslated but intimate questions, every hour is a series of small, stinging goodbyes, overlapping one another like an unlucky hand of cards.
This airless place, the throat swallowing sob after sob, is, of course, not the friendship at all. It is counterfeit, a wax impression of the love itself, of those untranslatable words you were determined—as you kissed his head before bed every night—someday to learn.
Now there is only his smell.
You cannot live without it.
You must.
He always smelled like himself. Like corn chips and leather, asleep on his back in the middle of the kitchen floor between the rituals of treats at 3:00 and wine on the deck at 5:00. If you went ahead with a bottle and glass, he barked sharply—inconsolably—from inside, certain you weren't coming back for him.
Then one day all barking stopped.
You have not heard his voice—stentorian, rich as a diapason—for many weeks now.
You feel an annoying compulsion to remain at the animal's side but are terrified of the pointless future without him.
They are fidgety afternoons, the days before goodbye.
