HOME | DD

Description
The Brute enlivened his solitude. He had thought of her as the Brute for years now, he realised, yet the name might suit him better. He was a large, shambling, slow moving man, whose thoughts, often disconnected, floated across his mind like ominous clouds across a darkening sky.

His solitude after his mother had died. He felt that the old lady’s prolonged and distressing departure from their shared life had emptied him. there seemed so little of him to fill the emptied house. Then the Brute came along. There was a significant age gap between them. The Brute at that time (how many years ago?) was full of optimism and energy, a ball of idiotic enthusiasms. She certainly got him out of house, teaching him a daily routine of the lead and a stick to throw. With strangulating efforts, as the lead tightened around her throat, she did her best to pull him and the lead into the unremarkable grassy space known locally as the Park.

He threw the stick, she bounded after it, yelping and growling at it once it was at the mercy of her sharp white teeth. He nodded to other doggers as their beasts engaged it those arcane and somewhat sleazy rituals that comprise Brute etiquette. The waning of her apparently inexhaustible energy was barely discernible at first, but by degrees the stick seemed of less and less importance to her.

As she rose from her sleep with a stretch and a groan he realised that proportionately her body was older than his. He saw the milk fog dimming her sight. He wondered how much difference made to her. She could still inform her self about the world with her moist and active nose. Her coat had lost the shiny gloss of youth, its dullness now flecked with grey. It seemed that she might be ailing.

He checked his savings, reminded as he did so the struggle he endured to pay for his old mother’s funeral. He felt he was making god-like decisions about the brute’s misery. After she was gone misery would once more be his alone.