vss | Katja Rammer

The first passing glance lasts only a millisecond, a snapshot of you on the bench below summer birches. Then, I squint at the book in your hands: Eldercare for Dogs. My choco-lab puppy nosys up to your gray-lipped beagle. Our eyes meet for a second, linger for another, deepen with a smile.

We watch the dog sniff each others tail ends for a minute, your face soft. Sad.

Wanna grab coffee?
Sure. I have an hour or so to spare.

I end up giving you the day. You steal my breath with witty conversation, picked wildflowers, and too much laughter.

We make plans for the cinema next week but find ourselves in the park every morning. Within a fortnight, we’ve establish a routine – never formally set but diligently observed.

I’m sure glad the dogs get along so well, I say after a month of walks, talks, and goodbye hugs that wrap around the heart like a warming blanket.

Love at first sniff, you chuckle. We both know we’re not talking about the dogs.
Come over for dinner? I ask.

A year after moving in together, you get a new puppy. I get a ring. Together, we love and fight, hurt and grow, build and rebuild. As one decade bleeds into the next, each of us carries the other’s soul, a gift treasured for a lifetime.

** I wrote this piece for Gavagai1000 weekly prompt – Week 12. The prompt word was love.

The old folks used to dish out warnings wrapped in intricate tales, oblique references, and euphemistic stories, forever failing to infix the severity of the danger awaiting in the woods, the water, the wilder and untamed parts of the marshland in us.

We went out to dig the vibes of the swamps in the day’s last light, Jonna and I, young and stupid and fortified by a bottle of the good stuff. The sunset darkened the shadows, deepened the silence; the swampland held its breath for a moment – then exhaled what our flashlights didn’t illuminate and our merry songs would not name.

We didn’t see the fog’s tendrils clinging like lace trains to our heels, didn’t notice it following us home and over the threshold. Sleep swallowed us like a sinkhole, cavernous and cold and hungry, and Jonna and I bobbing along like floaters.

We rose late and from damp bedsheets. Our bare feet left muddy footprints on Grannie Mo’s cedar wood floor. Jonna, choking on her coffee, spit out greenish phlegm. It filled the room with the scent of moss and brackish water.

‘What have you done?’ Grannie Mo asked.
“We lived, laughed–”
“Out.”

We went, giggling, back into the arms of the swamp, leaving four moist handprints behind.

** I wrote this piece for Gavagai1000 weekly prompt – Week 11. The prompt word was moist.