"The Last Walk"
This is a short story, written for my online writing class. It was written in tiny fragments at a time, over the course of about 5 torturous hours (though with distractions it was probably more like two,) during which I was horrifically sick to my stomach, then submitted about 3.5 hours before the deadline. In short- it sucks. I know this. Sorry. Candice wanted to see it, so though I hate the ending and haven't had a chance to edit it yet (read: I have been far too lazy,) I gave in. But fear not! It's below the cut, so you don't have to see it if you don't wish to.
Some background: The protagonist of this story is essentially me. Her name is even just my middle name, and my grandmother's maiden last name. The best friend is essentially my best friend from high school, Kassy. Her middle name is Lee, but I didn't like just Lee as a first name, so I combined the first two letters of her first name with her middle name (and threw in a y in the middle, because Kalee isn't a name.) Stevens is her mother's maiden name. Max is my dog- we really got him when I was 4 because Mom and I were sad about Dad being away for so long, his kennel name really was Achtung Erinbrook Starburst (not sure about the meaning first two names, but Starburst was because he was born on July 5th,) and he really had some kind of degenerative spinal disorder which is prevalent in specialty breed German Shepherds. I don't understand the disease very well, only that it caused him to slowly lose control of his body from the back end up. The main differences are as follows:
Please excuse my poor excuse for writing, overdone symbolism, and obvious implied metaphors (even the title is one...) It's the best I could whip up in 5-ish hours. Here's it is:
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I was four-years-old when, one sunny afternoon in August, my mother walked me to the nearby house of a local German Shepherd breeder, seemingly out of the blue. My father, a soldier in the Navy, had been out to sea for nearly three weeks, (which, at the time, was the longest I could remember him having ever been away in my life,) and after four straight nights of listening to me cry myself to sleep for missing him, my mom had evidently decided she could not stand it any longer. Her solution had been to give me something small and cuddly and needy to focus my attention on, in place of my father's absence.
Even now, I still remember the exact moment that I saw him. The owner of the kennel was going on and on about the virtues of the three excitable puppies which had immediately run up to me and licked at my calves when she had opened the gate to their pen. My mother had seemed equally enthusiastic about them. But the only puppy I had cared about that day was the little one in the back, sitting next to his mother, huddled into her side, and cautiously observing the scene before him. Standing by my mother's side, my tiny hand in hers, my eyes made contact with his, and I felt a connection of some sort.
His kennel name had been Achtung Erinbrook Starburst. However that was a bit long, and at four years of age I had had a terrible lisp, which prevented me from pronouncing words like “Achtung,” so we called him Max. We walked back to the house, one hand still tightly clasped in my mother's, the other holding onto the leash of the newest addition to our family.
The next year found our family living in a new town, and in fact in a different state altogether. We had moved in the middle of the school year, so all of the kids in my kindergarten class had already met each other and made friends. Then one day, while playing fetch with Max at the public park down the street from our new house, a little girl from my class had walked over to us and, by way of greeting, asked for the red rubber ball Max and I were playing with. The three of us played together for hours before she ever formally introduced herself.
“I'm Kaylee, by the way,” she said. “Kaylee Stevens.”
“M-Maria. Winn,” I replied, beckoning for Max to come to my side.
“Maria, huh? Nice to meet ya! And your dog? What's his name?”
“Max,” I stated, patting his head and managing not to stumble over my words this time.
“Maria and Max.. You guys aren't bad! I've got to go back home before it starts getting dark, but we should play again soon.” I nodded in reply, cheeks slightly flushed, and an impossibly wide smile on my face.
Thirteen years later, Kaylee and I stood side by side in matching dresses, cutting the absurdly large cake at our joint graduation party, to the sound of thunderous applause from both of our absurdly large families. Words alone are insufficient to describe the combination of fear and elation I had experienced throughout that day.
After seeing each other nearly every day for over a decade, Kaylee and I would be going our separate ways- she to New York City, to follow her dream of becoming a famous photographer, and I to a small city a few hours away from home, to eventually earn my Master's in English education. I could practically feel myself breaking out into a cold sweat at the thought of it when, to my right, I heard Max's happy bark as he scarfed down the piece of cake that had been put in his food bowl. I couldn't help but smile to myself, then, remembering that at least one of my best friends would be coming with me on this next great adventure.
Autumn of that year brought us hardship. Max had been having trouble with his joints for a while, at that point, and hadn't played or jumped properly in a year or more. I had taken to calling him “old man, “ in jest. It was when he began to have trouble standing up in the morning, sometimes actually dragging his back end behind him for a moment, that I finally decided a visit to the veterinarian was in order. I remember sitting on a lovely, but utterly uncomfortable chair in his office, stroking Max's velvety soft ears, trying to understand what it was that the vet was trying to tell me.
I understood, vaguely, that it was some sort of degenerative spinal condition, specific to Max's breed, but not much else. I was told that there was no treatment available, and so for the sake of my own sanity, and so as to not worry him, I chose to pretend I had heard nothing at all about his illness.
A year passed almost entirely without incident. I should have known that that was simply too good to be true.
It happened suddenly and without warning one early winter morning. The pain medication the vet had prescribed for Max was enough to mostly mask his symptoms, but not enough to prevent his condition from worsening. I pretended I didn't notice the ever-lengthening amount of time it too Max to successfully get himself up and off of his cushion every morning, but that didn't make it less true.
We left our tiny apartment that morning and set out on the well-worn path nearby, Max right by my side, as always. I noted, apprehensively, that he seemed particularly sluggish and careful in his movements this morning. My concern only increased when, forty minutes into the trek, we had only just passed the old, twisting, willow which approximately marked the first quarter of the path. Midway through the trek, our pace had become uneven and was barely at the speed of a crawl, Max's breath coming in ragged pants, and I knew we couldn't go any further. I sat down on a nearby log and pulled him up next to me, letting him rest his head on my lap. I pet his head and mumbled comforting words, listening to his erratic breaths, trying and failing to convince myself that the pace was returning to normal.
By mid-afternoon, Max's eyes were steadily drooping shut, his breathing still erratic, coming ever shallower and more slowly. I kissed his velvet soft ears and hugged him close, just wanting to make him comfortable, and to ensure that he knew he was loved.
The next day I returned from the vet's office, somber and pale, having traded in the cast off husk of my oldest friend for a silver urn full of his ashes, a generic poem engraved into the front, which I guess was supposed to comfort me. I placed it on the one windowsill in the house which had a view of the woods. Three days later, and no matter how I positioned it, it became obvious that that urn did not belong in this house, and those ashes did not belong in that urn. It wasn't what Max would have wanted. So though some part of me wanted to keep what little I had left of my oldest friend beside me, on the fourth day... I took a walk.
Urn in hand, I retraced the path we had walked together so many times in a few short years, scattering ashes as I went. When I reached the log we had stopped at before, where I had held and pet him for the last time, I scattered the remaining ashes and then deposited the urn, almost like a makeshift grave marker. After a moment's hesitation to survey my work, I turned and began the walk back to my apartment with a smile on my face; for though I walked alone today, what I had realized in those three days of keeping that awful urn in my house was that even though he was no longer physically with me, so long as I carried our memories together in my head and in my heart, I would never truly be alone.
Edit: Let the self consciousness begin! Why do I use so many commas?!! Why are my sentences so long and rambley!? They're called periods, Kaila- they end five-line-long sentences, and they are your friends. Make nice with them.
A heads up on one thing that isn't my fault- if some things sound awkwardly formal, like "could not" "would not" etc, it's because we are literally not allowed to use contractions except in dialogue. I think this is pretty much stupid, considering that this story is written in first person, and I don't know about you, but I don't think in formal written English at all times... but whatever. It is what it is. Now brb, dying of embarrassment at my truly pathetic writing skills.
Some background: The protagonist of this story is essentially me. Her name is even just my middle name, and my grandmother's maiden last name. The best friend is essentially my best friend from high school, Kassy. Her middle name is Lee, but I didn't like just Lee as a first name, so I combined the first two letters of her first name with her middle name (and threw in a y in the middle, because Kalee isn't a name.) Stevens is her mother's maiden name. Max is my dog- we really got him when I was 4 because Mom and I were sad about Dad being away for so long, his kennel name really was Achtung Erinbrook Starburst (not sure about the meaning first two names, but Starburst was because he was born on July 5th,) and he really had some kind of degenerative spinal disorder which is prevalent in specialty breed German Shepherds. I don't understand the disease very well, only that it caused him to slowly lose control of his body from the back end up. The main differences are as follows:
- Irl, we had already moved from Connecticut to New York when we got Max. I said that mom and I needed something to look after to take our minds off of dad's absence- this is true. However, unlike Maria, whose father had only been out to sea for three weeks, my dad was finishing up his last year and a half-ish of enlistment in the Navy in Groton, CT alone, while we moved to Canastota, NY without him to make sure the contractors building our house here did their job right and whatnot. So other than one or two visits over that time, I didn't see my father for between one and a half to two years. Significantly more deserving of a puppy, in my opinion, though that was a little too much detail to get into in this short story, particularly considering that I already went about 300 words over the "suggested" maximum.
- My dad was a Navy nuke/electrician thingy. EM1. Not a soldier. Again, simplicity.
- Though I was shy and awkward in my teen years, unlike Maria, I was rather loud and outspoken and charismatic as a kid. But for these short fiction writing exercises, we're asked to pick one defining characteristic for the main character, so I chose one which would help emphasize Maria's reliance on her dog's physical presence as form of emotional support.
- I'm obviously not 20, and Max is not still alive. Nor am I living on my own with him in an apartment. This was mainly to simplify things by eliminating the mother and father as characters that I would have to develop in any way, and also to lengthen the time that Maria and Max got together. My Max died when I was 16, and that sucked.
- This story started off as, basically, wish fulfillment. We were asked to "make fact into fiction" by taking a real experience from our lives and changing something about it to make it a story instead of a memory. I never got to say goodbye to Max. We all took him to the vet's office to be put down, because we knew that he was in for a lot of pain and hardship if his disorder continued to develop. We were all in the office with him, but I lost it after they put the IV in his leg (front right paw, red tape- it's amazing the things you don't forget years later. I remember how his blood backed up into the tube after they inserted the needle and I wanted to vomit and cry at the same time.) I've never cried harder about anything in my entire life- I started hyperventilating at one point. So I ran out of the room and left him with my significantly calmer mother and father, because I didn't want to scare him. I wish that Max had been able to go peacefully, of natural causes, somewhere beautiful instead of the cold linoleum floor of an impersonal vet's office, and that I'd had a chance to say goodbye. I wished that we'd had more time together. So that's how I made this story fiction.
Please excuse my poor excuse for writing, overdone symbolism, and obvious implied metaphors (even the title is one...) It's the best I could whip up in 5-ish hours. Here's it is:
-------------------------------------------
I was four-years-old when, one sunny afternoon in August, my mother walked me to the nearby house of a local German Shepherd breeder, seemingly out of the blue. My father, a soldier in the Navy, had been out to sea for nearly three weeks, (which, at the time, was the longest I could remember him having ever been away in my life,) and after four straight nights of listening to me cry myself to sleep for missing him, my mom had evidently decided she could not stand it any longer. Her solution had been to give me something small and cuddly and needy to focus my attention on, in place of my father's absence.
Even now, I still remember the exact moment that I saw him. The owner of the kennel was going on and on about the virtues of the three excitable puppies which had immediately run up to me and licked at my calves when she had opened the gate to their pen. My mother had seemed equally enthusiastic about them. But the only puppy I had cared about that day was the little one in the back, sitting next to his mother, huddled into her side, and cautiously observing the scene before him. Standing by my mother's side, my tiny hand in hers, my eyes made contact with his, and I felt a connection of some sort.
His kennel name had been Achtung Erinbrook Starburst. However that was a bit long, and at four years of age I had had a terrible lisp, which prevented me from pronouncing words like “Achtung,” so we called him Max. We walked back to the house, one hand still tightly clasped in my mother's, the other holding onto the leash of the newest addition to our family.
The next year found our family living in a new town, and in fact in a different state altogether. We had moved in the middle of the school year, so all of the kids in my kindergarten class had already met each other and made friends. Then one day, while playing fetch with Max at the public park down the street from our new house, a little girl from my class had walked over to us and, by way of greeting, asked for the red rubber ball Max and I were playing with. The three of us played together for hours before she ever formally introduced herself.
“I'm Kaylee, by the way,” she said. “Kaylee Stevens.”
“M-Maria. Winn,” I replied, beckoning for Max to come to my side.
“Maria, huh? Nice to meet ya! And your dog? What's his name?”
“Max,” I stated, patting his head and managing not to stumble over my words this time.
“Maria and Max.. You guys aren't bad! I've got to go back home before it starts getting dark, but we should play again soon.” I nodded in reply, cheeks slightly flushed, and an impossibly wide smile on my face.
Thirteen years later, Kaylee and I stood side by side in matching dresses, cutting the absurdly large cake at our joint graduation party, to the sound of thunderous applause from both of our absurdly large families. Words alone are insufficient to describe the combination of fear and elation I had experienced throughout that day.
After seeing each other nearly every day for over a decade, Kaylee and I would be going our separate ways- she to New York City, to follow her dream of becoming a famous photographer, and I to a small city a few hours away from home, to eventually earn my Master's in English education. I could practically feel myself breaking out into a cold sweat at the thought of it when, to my right, I heard Max's happy bark as he scarfed down the piece of cake that had been put in his food bowl. I couldn't help but smile to myself, then, remembering that at least one of my best friends would be coming with me on this next great adventure.
Autumn of that year brought us hardship. Max had been having trouble with his joints for a while, at that point, and hadn't played or jumped properly in a year or more. I had taken to calling him “old man, “ in jest. It was when he began to have trouble standing up in the morning, sometimes actually dragging his back end behind him for a moment, that I finally decided a visit to the veterinarian was in order. I remember sitting on a lovely, but utterly uncomfortable chair in his office, stroking Max's velvety soft ears, trying to understand what it was that the vet was trying to tell me.
I understood, vaguely, that it was some sort of degenerative spinal condition, specific to Max's breed, but not much else. I was told that there was no treatment available, and so for the sake of my own sanity, and so as to not worry him, I chose to pretend I had heard nothing at all about his illness.
A year passed almost entirely without incident. I should have known that that was simply too good to be true.
It happened suddenly and without warning one early winter morning. The pain medication the vet had prescribed for Max was enough to mostly mask his symptoms, but not enough to prevent his condition from worsening. I pretended I didn't notice the ever-lengthening amount of time it too Max to successfully get himself up and off of his cushion every morning, but that didn't make it less true.
We left our tiny apartment that morning and set out on the well-worn path nearby, Max right by my side, as always. I noted, apprehensively, that he seemed particularly sluggish and careful in his movements this morning. My concern only increased when, forty minutes into the trek, we had only just passed the old, twisting, willow which approximately marked the first quarter of the path. Midway through the trek, our pace had become uneven and was barely at the speed of a crawl, Max's breath coming in ragged pants, and I knew we couldn't go any further. I sat down on a nearby log and pulled him up next to me, letting him rest his head on my lap. I pet his head and mumbled comforting words, listening to his erratic breaths, trying and failing to convince myself that the pace was returning to normal.
By mid-afternoon, Max's eyes were steadily drooping shut, his breathing still erratic, coming ever shallower and more slowly. I kissed his velvet soft ears and hugged him close, just wanting to make him comfortable, and to ensure that he knew he was loved.
The next day I returned from the vet's office, somber and pale, having traded in the cast off husk of my oldest friend for a silver urn full of his ashes, a generic poem engraved into the front, which I guess was supposed to comfort me. I placed it on the one windowsill in the house which had a view of the woods. Three days later, and no matter how I positioned it, it became obvious that that urn did not belong in this house, and those ashes did not belong in that urn. It wasn't what Max would have wanted. So though some part of me wanted to keep what little I had left of my oldest friend beside me, on the fourth day... I took a walk.
Urn in hand, I retraced the path we had walked together so many times in a few short years, scattering ashes as I went. When I reached the log we had stopped at before, where I had held and pet him for the last time, I scattered the remaining ashes and then deposited the urn, almost like a makeshift grave marker. After a moment's hesitation to survey my work, I turned and began the walk back to my apartment with a smile on my face; for though I walked alone today, what I had realized in those three days of keeping that awful urn in my house was that even though he was no longer physically with me, so long as I carried our memories together in my head and in my heart, I would never truly be alone.
Edit: Let the self consciousness begin! Why do I use so many commas?!! Why are my sentences so long and rambley!? They're called periods, Kaila- they end five-line-long sentences, and they are your friends. Make nice with them.
A heads up on one thing that isn't my fault- if some things sound awkwardly formal, like "could not" "would not" etc, it's because we are literally not allowed to use contractions except in dialogue. I think this is pretty much stupid, considering that this story is written in first person, and I don't know about you, but I don't think in formal written English at all times... but whatever. It is what it is. Now brb, dying of embarrassment at my truly pathetic writing skills.