Put Down
written by: Sofie Willey
It’s an early Sunday morning in October when my sister wakes me without knocking and gives me that look. I understand without words that today’s the day we have to put down the dog. Put down. I’ve never really thought about it, but they’re strange words. I’ve put down plenty of things before, words onto paper, mugs onto coffee-stained table tops, money towards rent, but never a life. We don’t say we’re killing her, but that’s exactly what we’re doing: leading man’s best friend, my best friend, to the knacker’s yard. And that’s how the morning goes.
My sister holds her in the waiting room, cradled in one of our old taupe blankets we used to use for picnics. A bundle of bony ribs and somehow bonier, scalloped vertebrae tracking down her spine that blonde fur fails to hide anymore. My mind conjures up images of serrated bread knives, stegosauruses and wood saws. Looking at her makes me feel almost ill, which then makes me irrevocably guilty. Those huge, dark, still-alive eyes stare directly into mine and I wonder if she’s trying to tell me something. What would she say if she could? Does she understand where she’s going? Or, maybe, where she’s not going?
An olive-skinned, dark haired man, steps out of an examination room and calls for us. His face is handsome and for a moment I think about his life and job, doing this over and over again and being paid for it, even. I wonder if he has a partner he goes home to and if he cries to them about it. He looks too kind not to care but maybe it’s become second nature to him. Strangely, this idea doesn’t make me hate him, if anything I feel a selfish gratitude that it doesn’t have to be me with the syringe. We follow him into the room and lay the dog, still swaddled, on the table under white fluorescents. He says she’ll feel nothing.
Everything after this is faster than I imagined. I stroke her as the anaesthetic goes in and her chest rises, falls, rises again and falls still. After a moment I kiss her head and leave the white room.
Somehow it’s still that same early Sunday morning in October when my sister drives us home without her. Fiddling with the empty blanket in my lap and forcing myself to believe she felt nothing.
