I am suddenly awake, as if shoved through a door, and the only thing I’m aware of for a few brief, swiftly fading seconds, are the sharp needling sounds of his toe nails on laminate. Then the sound bleeds out of my head and into the suffocating blackness, replaced by this monstrous ache that builds up in my chest, sprouts legs, and then crawls into my throat.
There’s a wet rage in my sorrow. This feeling of flailing futility. I am sitting bolt upright on a secondhand mattress. I am staring into an abyss of nothing. I can hear the patterned thrum of the window shaker AC, the rats in the walls. Occasionally, the sharp intake of my breath through my teeth is startling. There is nothing and there is no one here. I am wide awake, wild-eyed.
Grief, regardless of whom or what it concerns, reaches a point that makes others uncomfortable. Grief has a definitive “healthy” shelf life in polite society.
I have yet to see any new flesh form over the axe wound in my chest. The gash is angry, oxblood red, rimmed with pus. Until then, I’ll seek solace in a bottle or a cigarette or driving fast and recklessly down dark roads.
Occasionally, my brain will spit out a little comforting staccato soundtrack of my dead dog coming to bed.
It startles me awake. It is dirty fingers digging in the wound.
I am still grateful for the mercy.
The Dappy Bint 