The Day After Christmas

I have three pizza cutters, not counting the two I already threw out, four kitchen thermometers, one with a hard crack line, three nutcrackers and numerous picks though I never buy whole nuts anymore, and two old dogs, including one that has laid motionless in the dining room at his spot for close to twenty-four hours.

He is still breathing and he will look at me but he moves his head only slightly to drink water from a bowl we hold for him or eat tiny bits of boiled chicken we put on the wood floor within his very weakened reach. The rest of the time he lies with his head resting on his paw. He doesn’t seem afraid or in pain. Just still. Endlessly still.

I want him to hear kitchen rustling, to know his people are near, so I clean three kitchen drawers and then I go sit in the living room to read the end of a very long book. The other dog paces a circuit and then stands next to my chair. When I stop petting him, he puts his head on my arm. It is not like him to be worried.

Like I did so long ago with a new baby, I tiptoe near the still and so clearly dying dog to see if he’s breathing. I see his side rise and fall. He is still with us.

We had planned to go to the vet today, to do what we have done before with our old sick dogs, sit on the floor with his head in our laps while the vet eased him out of this life. But the vet’s office is closed and we won’t go somewhere else, a place where they don’t know him, where he would be just another old dog. So, we’ve left him where he is, in his place in the dining room, next to the big plant and the radiator. He is resting. We will let him rest.

He is a good boy. Punchy.