The Dog Star

Linda Hill’s  Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt: The Beginning/The End

Photo by Greg on Pexels.com

The end rolled to shore, just down the hill from where I live, sometime after breakfast. I was eating a blueberry muffin.

Through my kitchen window I saw the sky flash and for one second, one little second  I tasted copper. My eyes itched a little and when I moved them to look up my face felt to heavy.

I saw the sky turn dark blue,  I saw it was streaked with purple- it looked like a giant bruise.

Did I try to get up? Did I try to run? I think I called for my dog, my star to lead me away from whatever was about to happen,  but there is no way for me to know if the words ever left my mouth.

After all.

When your world crosses paths with a magnetar you pretty much take your last thought with you before you die- because really- it is all over in the blink of an eye.

 

I was a ghost for awhile.

I drifted. I slept. I had dreams about the sky exploding over my head.

If I had a name I don’t remember it, I know I had a dog. Did dogs look like Maple Trees?  I remember what carrots tasted like. I remembered being warm, I remembered being cold. I remembered how good it felt to run.

Funny, I don’t remember liking to run.

But my thoughts, untethered always came back to carrots. Isn’t that funny?

I wonder what they looked like. Did they have legs? Did they bounce when they hit the ground?

 

When I wake up, when I think about carrots or blueberry muffins and what had legs and who had eyes, for just one moment I see the ocean- or maybe it’s the sky and it isn’t on fire.

It’s cool. It’s quiet. I’d like to touch it, but of course I can’t. So I try to remember it ,  just the way it is now before I fall back to wherever it is I go when I’m not here.

 

Yesterday. I know it was yesterday because I watched the Sunset and I saw it rise again, I remembered one thing- pools of dark gentle lights, a warm breeze, I could smell carrots.

I remembered carrots were orange, that they did not have legs or arms  and when you bit into them they crunched.

Do you know what else I remembered? Macbeth  liked carrots too. We used to sit on the bluffs and watch the tide come in and out and we ate baby carrots together.

So that was it! That was the last thing I said,  the the last thing I saw before I flew apart atom by atom into the morning sky, was ” Macbeth ” .

My dog. My companion. I used to call him my Dog Star.

My dog star, Macbeth.

And this is our story, this is what happened to us after the sky exploded.

We have been sailing together since the end,  parts of him, some of me, bound together by what  we saw,  the sounds we heard everyday of our lives.

Together we have been like a cloud hugging the top of a mountain or the branches of a tree.

I’m starting to remember before, who I was, that I used to do things like brush my hair and that I liked listening to music, that I used to have a family  but I’m thinking that is not important anymore.

So when Macbeth and I settle and I think it will be soon,  when the winds stop pushing us from the water to the land again and again, I don’t know who we will be or what we will be and that is okay.

This is, after all,  the beginning.

 

 

4 thoughts on “The Dog Star

    • This was a challenging piece, but fun! I really wanted to leavemy reader with the feeling that Macbeth was guiding the narrator from the time the world ended until
      they came back together in another. So having the thoughts flash into the here and now is the way dog’s think, so I went with it.
      I’m very glad you enjoyed this!
      Anita

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