Fixing a Hole

He plunged the point of the spade into the cold, stiff earth, cracking the soil and grinding the steel blade against the small granite pebbles below. It made a sound like sharpening a knife, slicing the ground in two.

Applying a little pressure with his foot, he pushed the blade further, pulled down on the handle with both hands and turned up a shovelful of black dirt and rock.

On the outskirts of the property, just inside the wood line, no one was looking as he put the spade into the earth again. He hoped he had found the perfect spot. No one was around for miles. They wouldn’t see him digging and start to ask questions. And anyway, he didn’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t something to be talked about. At least not right now.

His hands soon grew tired and he broke a light sweat. What collected on his forehead was soon dried in the chill air. And what seeped from his body was soaked up by his polo shirt and not visible under his jacket. His jacket was the kind mechanics and other blue-collar workers wear. It had a patch with a gas station logo on the right breast, and a patch that read “Jones” on the left. But that wasn’t his name.

His lower back began to ache, and he grew more tired.

With every shovelful of dirt he turned in that February afternoon, there amid the briars and dried leaves and pine straw, his thoughts were on her. She was all he could think about. She was the reason he was there.

He remembered how she used to crawl into his bed at night, and how warm they both were, under the covers. It made him feel safe to have her at his side. And he was sure she felt the same way, though she never said.

When they moved out to the suburbs last summer, he thought she might feel a little out of place. She was a city girl – always had been. Would she adapt to life away from the hustle and bustle? The first few nights might be kind of tough, he told her. There are sounds and silences in the suburbs you don’t hear in the city.

He hoped she would adjust quickly and grow to like it as much as he did. He grew up in the suburbs, along a suburban street, and went to a suburban school with other suburban people. After going to college in the city he decided he didn’t care too much for life there. But when he graduated he got a job in the city and stayed. And it was OK for a while. It was just the two of them. Them against the world.

They lived in a small one-bedroom place in the affordable part of town. It was no place for her to live, he always thought to himself. The apartment had a small kitchen and a small living room and a small bedroom with two proportionately small closets built into one wall. He was never sure if she liked it there and always thought she might like to have more space. He thought she deserved more space.

So after he landed a good job writing for the big-city newspaper – feature stories and occasional restaurant reviews – he was making more money and he moved them out to this quaint little town east of the city. It had good schools and a lot of churches, which he thought was important, though he never went to one.

He thought about these things as he dug into the earth at the back of the property that day. All of the leaves had fallen off the trees and the cold was making his nose run a little. He thought about these things as she lay there, wrapped in a pale cotton bed sheet taken from the bed they shared the night before.

He hoped he’d chosen a spot where he wouldn’t be disturbed as he dug, where she wouldn’t be disturbed as nature took its course and returned her body to the earth. He dug deeper, and wider, and thought about how fortunate it was all the leaves had fallen. He figured he would scatter them around, hiding the freshly-dug grave.

He remembered how they first met and how he was immediately drawn to her and her to him. She was a runner, and had a lithe and athletic build. Her brown eyes sparkled as they peered out from her angular face. Her dirty-blonde hair shone in the summer sun on their walks through the downtown park. They would watch the children play, the people walk and talk and hold hands as if nothing in the world could spoil their apparent good fortune.

They were together about eight years, nearly every waking moment, bonded by an undying love and a mutual respect for one another. When he was wrong, she would let him know and he always got the message.

And as he lifted her body, bound tight in the soft, white sheet, and laid her down in the grave, he thought to himself he may never love another dog as much as her. She was his everything: his best friend, his partner, his companion. A lovely, lovely Labrador.

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Michael Davis was born and raised in the Atlanta area and has been a mop pusher, a bartender and a newspaper man. He is currently working in PR and looking for a good story to tell. He blogs occasionally at In Defense of Crabgrass.