How a Mother Loves

When their dog disappeared out back, last May, fifteen years after they’d brought him home, she looked until she found him, down the hill and under some hemlocks where he’d lain down to die, the way animals do—she says she knew that’s what he was doing—and though he was too big for her to lift and she had no cartilage in the joint of one hip she got him up the hill too steep to mow and into the house to his spot by the door and he lived there another week and a half, with her lifting him up with a towel each morning and hugging him to sleep at night, since he could neither stand nor lie down, nor remember what to let go of, to fall asleep.

© Rebecca Starks,  appearing online in The 2River View