Emily Rinkema

Content Warning

pet death/euthanasia, miscarriage

We stop at the store on the way to put the dog down. John wants beer, for after, he says. It’s Saturday afternoon, so Kenny and Junior and Mark are standing outside smoking when we pull up and they all nod towards me and go back to their conversation. I stay in the car with the dog, who’s lying in the backseat, panting.

When John comes out with the six-pack, he stops to talk to his friends. They all look at the car and Kenny takes his hat off. He shakes his head slowly. I smile at them. Mark, John’s best friend since high school, comes to my window.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “What’re you going to do, right?”

“Right,” he says. He looks in the backseat. “Good dog,” he says.

“Where you doing it?” asks Kenny from the steps by the door. “Pacquette’s?”

“Yeah,” says John. “We have an appointment.” He laughs. “An appointment to kill the dog.” He’s been calling her “the dog” since we made the appointment yesterday. 

Last night, John wanted to have sex. I told him our dog was dying. He said that didn’t mean we couldn’t have sex, that she wasn’t going to die while we were having sex. He told me to stop being melodramatic, that dogs die all the time, that’s what they do. It’s no big deal.

I took my pillow and a blanket and slept downstairs with the dog.

When we get to the vet, John has already had two beers. He didn’t speak for most of the twenty-minute drive and then told me he might start smoking again.

“It’d be nice to be able to hang out with the guys at the store,” he said.

“You don’t have to smoke to hang out with them,” I said. “Don’t be an ass,” I added. 

He turned the radio up.

The parking lot is almost full even though we made the last appointment of the day. I get out of the car and go around to the back seat with the leash in my hand. She wags her tail but doesn’t lift her head. I slide my arms beneath her body and pull her to me. She smells like strawberry shampoo. Last night I gave her a bath, lifting her carefully into the tub, running the water until it turned warm. She let me gently lather her up and then rinse the suds off. I talked to her the whole time, listing the birds I’d seen at the feeder, describing the feeling of the grass on my toes, telling her about the first time I saw her. I kept rinsing, running my hands over her ears, her back, her legs, even after the suds were gone and my fingers were wrinkled and cold. 

“Get the door for me,” I say to John, but he’s still in the car. “John,” I repeat, “Get the fucking door.” But at that moment, Vicki, one of the vet techs comes out to meet us. She closes the car door behind me and puts her hand on my back.

“Hi, baby,” she says to the dog, kissing her on the ear. “Come on,” she says to me. John is still in the car and I hear him open another beer.

I’ve done this before, but it’s no easier this time, even though I know what to expect. I wonder if I am losing my capacity for loss. 

Inside, I sit on the floor, my back against the cool wall, cradling her head in my lap as the drugs do their job. I feel the silkiness of her ear. I rub the spot where her cheek meets her neck. Over and over, I tell her she’s a good girl. I can hear a child in the room next door, or maybe it’s a dog, a high-pitched sound like a laugh. I want to be able to feel the exact moment when she goes from here to not here. I want there to be a change in the temperature of the room or in the density of the air.

John’s not in the car when I come out. I don’t even look for him before I drive away.

He’s still not home at 9:30. I call his cellphone, but he doesn’t pick up. I put my coat on, grab the keys and tell the empty room I’ll be right back. 

I find him at O’Malley’s. Kenny and Junior and Mark are there too. John is in a booth in the corner, his head on the table, asleep or passed out, or somewhere in between. 

“He’s okay,” says Mark, leading me to the bar. He nods at the bartender and then there’s a beer in front of me. 

“He’s an asshole,” I say.

“Yes, he is,” Mark says.

In the morning, John tells me he thinks he needs a break. He won’t look at me. My head hurts from the three beers I had at O’Malley’s before the guys carried John to my car, and I can’t believe what he just said.

“A break? From what, John?” My brain pounds against my skull and I sit on the couch. 

He won’t look at me, pours a cup of coffee and goes back into the bedroom. 

We got the dog ten years ago, right after we got married. She was John’s first dog and so I let him pick her out, let him name her and choose the collar, a red one, because she was black and white and he said it reminded him of that stupid kid’s joke. He had so many rules for the dog: no dog on the couch, no dog in the bedroom, no dog on the bed. 

At six o’clock I get off the couch to feed the dog. I make it to the mudroom before I remember. John’s been gone since noon, when he came out of the bedroom, walked right past me, opened the door, and got into Mark’s car. I open a beer, tuck my legs under me on the couch, and stay there until I’m tired enough to sleep.

The next morning I call in sick. I go down to the store to pick up coffee and there’s John on the steps with the guys. They’re all smoking. I pull back out of the parking lot to get coffee somewhere else.

Four years ago, after my third miscarriage, I told John he could go. We had made it to 20 weeks this time, had found out that it was a girl, that she was a girl. I told him he hadn’t signed up for this, that he should go have a family with someone else. I told him that sometimes I felt guilty. I told him I felt so hollow I was afraid to touch anything. I told him I stayed awake some nights so I wouldn’t dream, that sometimes days went by without me feeling anything. I told him that sometimes I felt so light I thought I would float away, and that sometimes I felt so heavy I couldn’t move. I told him it was too much, that I just couldn’t carry it alone anymore. I told him I thought I might break. 

We were on the couch, the dog sprawled across our laps. 

“It’ll be fine,” he said, rubbing that spot just behind the dog’s right ear. She leaned into his hand, tilting her face. When I didn’t say anything else, he said, “It’s no big deal. We’ll just try again.” 

Mark calls when I am at the grocery store. I am in the dog food aisle. The bag is already in the cart before I realize it. It’s the blue bag with the Yellow Lab on it, running towards the camera, tongue hanging out. I am leaning into the cart to put it back when the phone rings. 

Mark tells me John is at his house, that he doesn’t know what to do. “Please come,” he says. 

“Okay,” I say, because it seems like the only option.

When I get to Mark’s house it’s just after four in the afternoon and the sun is high and hot. I roll down the windows in the back, then remember I don’t have to. I leave them down anyway.

John is on the couch, his arms around his knees. He doesn’t look up. Mark goes into the kitchen and leaves us alone. I sit on the floor with my back against the couch. 

She never greeted us at the door when we came home. She’d wait upstairs on her ottoman, the one we bought for us but gave to her after the first night that she claimed it. We laughed about filling the room with ottomans because she loved it so much. John said she must be Turkish, which cracked us up. Our Turkish princess, he called her. 

We brought her to a private park once. “No dogs allowed” the sign clearly said, but there were no other cars around so we grabbed our backpack with a bottle of wine in it and a baguette and ran down the wooden walkway to the overlook. John set out a blanket and we drank wine from the bottle and ripped bread from the baguette and watched our dog chase birds through the reeds. 

“We could get arrested.” I laughed, one eye on the parking lot. 

“If the cops come,” he said. “We’ll tell them we don’t know her.” 

She slept on our bed every night. 

We stay at Mark’s house for hours, John on the couch, me on the floor. I am determined not to be the first to speak. Mark has long since left, saying he had errands to do. The house gets darker. 

“I keep thinking we have to get home,” he says, finally.

I stay quiet. I know how much this matters, this next part, how it will make all the difference.

“It’s too much,” he says. “I don’t think I can do it,” he says.

I don’t know what specifically he means, that he can’t do it. I don’t know what the “it” is in that sentence, what’s too much, what he can’t do, if those are the same. I think about asking him to clarify, to make him name it, to get angry and demand that he talk to me. I think about grabbing him by his shoulders and shaking him and screaming at him to say what he means. I think about pummeling him with my fists until I see him break into pieces in front of me. 

“Okay,” I say, standing up. 

I know I am going to go home now and let myself into the empty house. I will make myself a drink and turn on some music and stay awake until I can’t. And tomorrow morning I will go to work and at the end of the day I will come home. And I’ll do that again and again. And next month, I will put all of the dog’s stuff into a box to bring to the shelter, except her leash, which will stay hanging by the front door until I forget it’s there. 

This piece was first published by The Bridport Prize where it was highly commended in 2024

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing most recently appeared in X-R-A-Y, Variant Lit, Flash Frog, Mudroom Magazine, and Fictive Dream and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).