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1 HALLOWEEN
NOW
STELLA
I’d know the bark anywhere.
I could be one hundred and six, and I’d still know that bark.
Tucking my notebook under the cushion of the porch swing, I stand, moving toward the steps and turning to face the road leading to my house, but I see nothing. Considering I live on the very outskirts of Ashford, the Pine Barrens butting up against the back of my property, people only come down this road unless they live here. I wasn’t paying great attention to what cars drove past, though, so wrapped up in what I was working on.
Still, I hear and see nothing on the road. A winding driveway leads to the garage behind my house, but I didn’t notice anyone driving up it.
Sighing to try and regulate my pulse, I push back on the railing of the porch that finally sold me on this house four years ago, moving back toward the swing to sit, convincing myself it was nothing.
I have to be hearing things. My mind is playing a cruel, cruel trick on me. It wouldn’t be the first time it was an enemy of my own making.
Even after I sit back down, my blood pounds in my veins at the reminder of what I used to have and who I once was. I don’t reach for the notebook I tucked away—even without trying, I know the muse is long gone.
Instead, I sit on the chair, my arms wrapped around my knees, my ears tuned to try and hear even the slightest whimper, to recapture the sweet memory once more, to hone it and sharpen what had started to become dull.
The funny thing about sounds is that your mind doesn’t catalog the mundane as if it’s the last time you’ll hear it. It’s easy for us to experience a moment and commit what it looks like and feels like to memory, but it’s the sounds that fade the quickest.
When you want it most of all, when it’s dark, and you’re painfully lonely, and the heavy blanket of your emotions suffocates, you reach for it to remember what someone sounded like or the deafening roar of a crowd and… it’s gone.
It’s like that feeling when you have a song stuck in your head but can’t fully remember what it sounds like, how the melody goes, or what the words are. If you could just listen to it, you’d get some peace, but instead, you can’t even remember enough to think of the name.
I’d give anything to hear the bark once more when I’m aware it’s the last time, so I know to catalog it better.
Closing my eyes, I lay back against the swing that’s rocking gently on its own, and I try to recreate it in my mind, synch it up with one of the dozen memories that have haunted my dreams and waking moments for the past seven years.
And then it happens.
I hear it once more, the bark of a dog. My chest constricts when it’s followed by the jingle of tags and a whimper. My eyes pop open and instantly begin to water as I scan the lush green of my yard, my heart dropping through the wood planks when I don’t see her.
God, the memories that sound brings.
The pain.
I wonder briefly if the neighbors got a new dog. Maybe that’s what I’m hearing, obscured through trees and space and too many emotions. I wonder what it will do to my ever-fragile mental state if that’s the case.
Will I get used to hearing that sound, or will it always feel like a knife is rooted deep in my chest every time it makes its way on a breeze to me?
Before I can contemplate anything else, like, say, moving to Antarctica, where I’m pretty sure German Shepherds don’t get much outside time to bark and tear open old wounds, I see it.
A black and brown blur bounding to me, her tongue out, ears back, tags on her collar clinking like music to my ears, a song I haven’t heard in seven years.
My Gracie girl.
I almost trip down the three steps of my porch to the path before I kneel as she reaches me, letting her pounce on me and start licking my face, whimpering as she does.
It’s her. Her snout is covered in greying fur, and she’s bigger than I remember, but it’s her. Either I’ve officially lost it, and I’m having the most wonderful hallucination known to man, or somehow, someway, my dog is here, her paws on either side of my shoulders, nearly knocking me over with her excitement.
My mind doesn’t have a chance to process the hows of why she’s here, not before a pair of dark brown boots are in my line of vision, the toes worn and shiny, the rest matte and battered. My eyes travel up as my hand rubs into Gracie’s coat, and the boots disappear beneath a pair of old, worn-in jeans, ending somewhere underneath a fitted black tee worn under a red and black flannel.
My eyes continue up even though I know what I will see before I even make it there.
He looks the same and wholly different, his jaw more cut than the last time I saw him, but his cheeks are less hollow than I remember, dusted with a fine layer of scruff that needs shaving. His eyes are the same bright green that haunted my dreams for years, but they aren’t sunken in anymore, no longer set in deep under eye bags from lack of sleep and abusing his body. There’s a single dimple on his cheek, his full lips quirked just a bit to one side. His hair is longer, light brown, with a light wave ending at his jaw. He runs a hand through it, pushing it away from his face before he opens his mouth and I realize this illusion is anything but.
