“Come on, Ella,” I plead, pulling on the leash, “just fucking go already.”
I’ve been outside in the rain for ten minutes waiting for my boyfriend’s dog to take a shit. She looks up at me, her eyes cloudy with cataracts thick as nickels, and huffs.
Rain continues to fall, soaking through the hoodie I grabbed from Michael’s closet, and we keep walking. Her every step is awkward and painful so our progress is slow. She’s an old dog; fourteen years and every one of them shows. She has a lump the size of a tennis ball on her hip and a beard of grey fur around her mouth.
Michael’s had her ever since she was a puppy. She’s been with him through his whole adult life. Through a marriage and eventually a divorce, through apartments in the city and houses in the suburbs.
But he’s with me now.
Michael loves to joke that Ella’s the number one lady in his life, and I’m the number one man. But I know better. You can only have one number one. That’s how rankings work.
I’ve never been an animal lover, even less when I’m forced to compete with one for attention. It’s been a bit of an adjustment to say the least. Ella can’t be left alone for too long, so Michael won’t spend the night at my apartment. Instead we sleep in his bed, Ella between us. I now find dog hair everywhere: on my clothes, in my car, in my mouth. She whines in the morning to wake us up, and barks whenever we have sex. And Michael dotes on her. She can do no wrong in his eyes, no matter how many times she pees on the carpet, or suddenly gets sick just when we’re about to leave for a weekend in New York. She chews at my every nerve like a Milkbone. But I love Michael. He’s handsome and successful, kind and compassionate. A far better man than I probably deserve. So I will wait the bitch out.
When we first started dating, Michael told me he worried Ella wouldn’t be around much longer. He talked about how devastating it will be to lose the only constant in his life. And while it’s true her days are numbered, I’m beginning to suspect that number is larger than I thought. If anything Ella has only gotten stronger, like she knows I’m waiting for her to die and holds on out of spite.
Which makes the current situation all the more pathetic. Standing in the rain with this decrepit canine anxiously waiting for her to shit so I can pick it up.
We shuffle through the next block, Ella’s tail still managing a wag. Finally, she saunters to a patch of grass and assumes the position.
“There we go,” I tell her, excited to get back to Michael’s and scrub my hands to the bone.
I unroll a plastic bag that seems cruelly thin. As far as I’m concerned, bags meant to be the barrier between your hand and feces should be as thick as possible. It’s why I buy expensive toilette paper.
I turn my head as I grasp the turd. I can feel the heat of it through the plastic and I cringe. I quickly flip the bag inside out and twist it off, holding as small a portion of it as possible. I take a step forward and my foot slides along the grass.
On no. In my haste to clean up, I missed a turd, and have now smeared Ella’s shit all over my shoe.
“Fuck,” I sigh, and drop the bag and leash on the ground. I take my shoe off my foot and start scraping at it with a piece of bark. Flinging shit and grass on the sidewalk. Ella stands watching me.
“You’re enjoying this aren’t you?”
She wanders away as I’m trying to see if I’ve gotten it all and she keeps barking and I look up to see her walking out to the middle of the street. Suddenly she’s illuminated in the headlights of an oncoming car.
I think about shouting out, or running over to try and grab Ella back to safety. I think about Michael and imagine his beautiful blue eyes bloodshot from crying as I comfort him, holding him and telling him I’m there for him. I’m already composing a sob story, conjuring tears to my eyes.
The tires screech as the car slams on its breaks, but it’s too late. Her days were numbered anyway.
Matthew Turkot is a Chicago native and writer of prose. He is a student at Columbia College Chicago pursuing an MFA in fiction. He is a teacher and bartender and many other things.