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The Seconds–Derek Sheffield

Last patches of snow all but gone and first wildflowers flecking the lawn, I walked out to the shed and pulled open the door with a woody squeak, and there, rising from the dirt floor, surrounded by a dusty clutter of tools, a little mountain, the kind of thing my daughters might have scooped together in the fall and left for the faeries if it weren’t a perfectly conical accretion of turds. What to make of such a thing, holding the door, and beholding it in the spill of the first light—and then I knew the droppings. Here she was, my old dog, that golden shuffle of paling wheat fields who’d retrieved and licked clean how many rocks thrown from this hand? What was left of her, here. What creature had carried each dried nub from the yard’s far corners to form this strange cairn? There, under the nail-hung weed whacker, my grease rag on the floor pressed flat: a little bed I kneeled to touch. Something had curled here in the gasolined nights all winter as snow and more snow made a world of white mounds. I walked around back, searching for a gap, and stopped mid-step— a big, squirrel-like bulk on my scrap wood, the black, unblinking shine of a left eye tilted toward mine. No glimmer of flight in that orb, no twitch of scurry, only the deepest calm as if the ages of the earth were taking my measure. I felt like a pane of glass even as I took all I could of it, its weight and whiskers and wide, rounded ears, a long bottlebrush tail stretched out over my pile of sawed lengths of lumber and plywood, and later I would look for it in a book among my stacks. That night, after I turned out the lights, and my daughters asked for another story, I told them of its midden while I sat on their floor, becoming another dark shape among the heaps of their clothes and stuffed animals; at first, “Eww!” and then only the sounds of breathing as they remembered their old dog, those restless slopes that passed through their arms, the river sounds she made licking those rocks to death. Let us not let go ever, is what I took from your cave-wall stare, wood rat, who would grab every bloody tooth my girls have tucked under their pillows, pack rat, who would make hill after hill of all the years of their homework, vestigial historian, who’d cleave to the locks of do-it-yourself haircuts and clutch every tremor of their changing voices, their first words, every shape and shade of their widening gazes, and all the hard shit, too, the nights of no sleep, the wet beds and fits and screams, slammed doors and shaken fists (how long have you been with us? how many iterations of you and them and me?), even as you turned at last toward the woods behind our house and slowly, one careful step at a time, slipped away as if you’d already snatched all the rain-colored seconds from all the clocks that ever were or will be.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash