The Weather

         I touched the dog’s ear timidly as he lay on our porch. He wasn’t ours. He belonged to the neighbor, an old man of nearly eighty who could not see well and would always walk with such pain when we went outside, where he would always complain of the weather. They were one another, in other forms.
The dog didn’t move away when I touched him, only groaned and moved his old body slightly to avoid the pain of old age. I looked down at my hand on his ancient, dirty head.

         I had touched my father’s hand once, when I was a child. I had eased my feet gently upon the carpet on his bedroom floor as he lay sleeping. His body was thin and frail, yet seemed enormous under his thin, flowered blankets and pillows. One arm hung perfectly over the bed; it was covered in black hair, and slowly I reached out to feel the strands under my fingers, which were soft and white and very young. His nails were yellowed with tobacco and many years of washing without soap. I saw how his fingers curved inward, seemed to touch one another as though for support, and his thumb, thin and frail, clung to the rest like a child; afraid to break away and be lost. I felt the years of wrinkles, like one might feel the bark on some tragic, broken tree which sprouts from rocks and bends its wild branches to the wind, like a prayer of desperation instead of devotion.
I had laced my fingers with his as he slept, and my heart raced. My hand didn’t look right in his, like I had reached out to hold the hand of a statue. But I felt it, and I drank in the warmth and closed my eyes. My body awkward and small on his carpet - I felt the life in his skin.
He drew his body away in reflex and my breath stopped. Pulling his hand under his heavy chest as he turned on the bed; and I sat very still and waited. I did not move until dawn, when finally I crept down the hall and lay in my bed, holding my hand out from me as though it were glass. I never touched him again.

         I heard my neighbor calling for his dog in the morning. His voice frail and deep, as though it may break from too great a sorrow. I knew before I went outside, the dog had died there. His body was stiff and strange, and his eyes were not closed peacefully. I did not touch him. I brought my neighbor his paper, to save his legs, and he spoke of the weather.