She wouldn’t let him dig the hole first. He knew without asking, because he wouldn’t have wanted it either. But it would have been better. Quicker. Avatar lay wrapped in a blanket on her back porch, dead. He shoved the blade into the dirt, levered out another spadeful, and heaped it onto the growing mound beside him. The earth was dry and crumbly but full of stones, so he had to stop digging every few minutes and pry them loose with a pickaxe.
He’d dug holes before, of course: in Leanne’s garden; replacing drain tile; and for the foundation of a new shed, which the kids dubbed the Taj Mahal. That had been work, though; this was ritual. Every scoop added weight to the burial’s indefinable sense of finality.
Andrea had wanted to help him remove Avatar’s body from the house to the back yard; he told her to go for a walk. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “You don’t need to add this to your collection of last memories.”
Funerary linguistics vexed him. It was all simile and metaphor. Avatar was about to be deposited in his final resting place. His spirit hadn’t been set free.
In fact, he had become that most dreaded of words, the one we have trouble saying about those we love… he was dead. A corpse… That word troubled him, too—with its curt definitiveness. The clinical, pathological truth didn’t capture the implications of death and dying any better than the veiled language of churches and funeral parlours, Buddy thought.
True: Your heart stops beating when you die; the biological functions that sustain the trillions of cells that are the colony of you, cease.; decay begins its work. That describes the state of being dead, not its cause or meaning.
He gouged out another spadeful of dirt. Sifted memory for some kind of truth. When Andrea asked him into the room, Avatar had already been put under. He lay in his shroud, unconscious but breathing. Deeply.
“If only he’d been able to find a peaceful place when he was living, we wouldn’t have to be doing this,” Andrea lamented.
“But then he wouldn’t be Avi, would he?”
“No.”
“When you were alone with him, he was okay, though?”
Andrea stroked Avi’s snout and ran her hand over his eyes, her palm gliding over the top of his head. “He would lean up against me on the sofa and fall asleep, then settle in with his head on my lap. So gentle. So loving.”
“Sure you want to go ahead with this, Andy?”
“No,” she quavered. “But we have to.”
“Will you hate me afterwards?”
“You’re doing something I can’t, and the way it needs to be done, Buddy.”
He glanced up at her.
“With compassion. You love Avi in your own way, don’t you?”
Buddy didn’t answer right away. Didn’t conceal his doubt. But in the end, he nodded. “He’s beautiful.”
“Don’t let go of that thought,” she nodded toward the IV, which she’d set up with the syringe attached… All he had to do was push the plunger. “Don’t let go of him until he’s gone.”
With a curt nod, Buddy agreed.
Hooking the barrel flange between his index and middle fingers, he pushed with his thumb, a slow, even pressure, overcoming the slight resistance of the syringe’s mechanisms and the pressure in Avi’s veins. The plunger went in smoothly, the poison flowing silently into Avi’s bloodstream. Avi’s breathing slowed, then stopped. Without a whimper, he was gone. All that remained was his body—his corpse.
That’s when Buddy told her to go for a walk. “I’ll take care of this,” he urged.
When she hesitated, he ordered her to “Go!” in a voice that was kind but firm.
For once, she obeyed.
The hole dug, Buddy dragged the blanket with Avatar in it over the lawn to the edge of the grave. He grasped the four corners of Avi’s shroud, making a sort of sling to lower the remains as gently as he could into the pit. When he let go the fabric, it fluttered down, the top end opening so that Avatar’s head was exposed. Even then, after so short a time, you could tell the dog wasn’t sleeping. Avi’s fur had taken on a bedraggled look already, and his eyes were dead, his lip curled into something like a snarl. Buddy reached in and folded the blanket over him again, then began shovelling in the dirt, setting aside the stones. Finished shovelling, he raked the soil level and patted it down with his hands.
Then he put the garden tools away and went back into the house to see if Andrea had returned.
“Thank you,” she said.
He hugged her hard for a few seconds, then stepped back to take her in. “You okay?”
“I’ll be alright.”
“I set some stones aside, in case you wanted a memorial of sorts.”
Andrea shook her head. “He’s in here,” she said, tapping her left temple. “And here,” she patted her chest, weeping silently.
“Okay. I’ll go finish up, then.”
Fetching her wheelbarrow from the shed, he heaped the stones into it carefully, trying to keep them from clanging against the metal bucket. He wheeled the load to the end of Maple Street, then half-way up the hill of Esplanade, where he turned down what looked like a private drive but was actually the access to a riprap jetty, jutting into Horseshoe Bay. He stacked the stones there, a haphazard cairn of river rock by the edge of the sea, that will stand for any eternity I’m ever likely to to know.
Then Buddy wheeled the barrow home, grabbed a rake, and smoothed over Avi’s grave once more, so it would be harder to find.
Next: Horror Stories