Blue Rain

My mother had died in December. I don't know when our dog died. It was the spring after. Or was it summer? The flowers were in bloom, is all I know.

We had a large garden. Large lawns, bushes to crawl around in and flower beds to trample. I've never seen a creature happier than her, when she ran around from one end to the other, a little black fur ball, digging up the freshly planted geraniums with her hind legs as she chased after songbirds. My parents would scold her, but even they couldn't hold a grudge against her for long.

We had a small pond near the edge of our patio with some flowering plants growing above it. It was a wisteria, my father told me. I don't remember what it was. Its petals, like blue rain, fell into the pond. Like a Roman mosaic, they covered the surface of the water in violet-blue pebbles.

I sat on the patio with a good view of the pond. Reading, I think. Our dog was running around. I threw tennis balls for her and sometimes she brought them back, sometimes she didn't. When she was exhausted, she drank from the water. We did this all day long, as we always did on sluggish sweltering summer days.

By evening she was drowsy. It wasn't even dark and already she was laying beside me on the patio, panting heavily. The pupils of her eyes were dilated so far, her whole head was black except for the red grin of her mouth and tongue. When I called her, she got up, but slowly, shaky. I called my father.

Later, he came into my bedroom. I couldn't be near her, however much it pained me to see her this way, however much I wanted to comfort her. I always ran away, when things turned bad. He said the vet was unsure, there was nothing much he could do on a weekend, this late and this far away from his clinic. He told us to wait and see. I prayed.

The next morning, my father told me not to go into the office, where her dog bed was. He told me that she went to sleep, that he was at her side. I hugged him tight, but I just wanted to feel her in my arms.

He buried her in the rain. The next day, he chopped down the plant, burned out the roots and made the rest into firewood. There is still a little patch behind the house, where we let the flowers and grasses grow for her.