Featured Short Story: Motherly Instincts

Motherly Instincts
Written by Caroline Huftalen

“You remember what it felt like the day you left?” Brutus asked.

“Like smelling grass for the first time, sniffing in all the things that life had been hiding just outside my reach,” Lucy replied, closing her eyes and stopping to allow herself to look back a few months without being interrupted by the trail ahead of them.

Their friendship had begun out of survival but had slowly, with growing trust, become familiar and reliable. Brutus had been on his own for at least six months before he met Lucy. His owner had simply packed up and left, leaving only the image of the exhaust pipe behind.

He had watched for weeks, as his family grew more distant. The children clung to his furry neck as the parents fought over money, or more accurately, the lack of it. His food was changed from Science Diet to Alpo. He could taste the aluminum of the can even after the mush was put into his dish. After one final fight that ended with both children crawling into his never washed dog bed, the family began to bring boxes home. The children whispered in his ear about moving in with their grandparents and how that backyard was bigger, and grandma a better cook. He had looked forward to the long car ride, nestled between both children in the backseat of their beat-up mini van.

A U-Haul truck came and took the bed frames, the couch, the dining room table and the boxes that wouldn’t fit in the back of the van. The day before they left, he saw them throw away his dog bed. Figuring they were just going to get him a new one at grandmas, replacing the old dirty one for a new, clean bed that would fit the new home’s standards; he was not alarmed. The next morning, they took his collar off, the tags tinkling as they too went into the garbage. The children cried and patted his head. They let him out into the backyard, dumped the remainder of his food into his dish. He ate hungrily, filling up for the voyage. When he heard the motor turn on, that was his cue to run around to the front and jump into the seat, tail wagging, panting in excitement. But by the time he reached the driveway, the car was already in the street. He ran to catch them, to be looked at in the rearview mirror, to stop and remind them that they forgot a very important member of the family. But the van kept going, and sped off as he increased his speed as well. He saw the final puff exit the pipe.

The telling of this story had been the turning point in their friendship. They had been arguing about something that Lucy no longer remembered and he had said, just to hurt her, “That at least his owners had loved him.” And she had thrown back, “Then why are you here, alone, if they loved you so much?” The look in his eyes had been enough to break Lucy out of her state of self-obsessed anger. She approached, apologized and listened as he told his tale. They both knew the truth behind it, it was just easier to sift through memories, choosing which to hold, which to let go. Lucy wished it were that easy.

Caroline Huftalen is the founder of Busking at the Seams.