I Was Her Only Life

• Julia Dickerson, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2019

Details struggle to fill my mind. I can only remember the bad parts.
She was sprawled across my lap, her sides rising and falling, her nose was mashed against the ground, hiding in the grass in the most uncomfortable-looking position. Dogs were exuberant. Except this one wasn’t exuberant for long enough.
My hand caressing her frame gently. The sunset threatening to dip behind the horizon, firstly cascading a prim bombardment of colours that were flung across the sky. She’s still there. The receding blues and oranges battled the blackness and pushed it away with arms and legs. All body movements. Slowly fading away. The radiant glow scintillated and beamed. The sun hanging so impossibly in the sky, a perfect circle without strings or supports, was omniscient and omnipotent and was left hanging in the crisp air. It slowly floated downwards like a deflated balloon, and as I traced the sun with my eyes, she's gone. She has faded. No longer laying peacefully in my arms, but buried deep into soil. She’s gone.
She was only here for three months. She only lived for 2190 hours. I was her whole world, and she never lived it fully. And once that first tear broke free, the rest followed in an unbroken stream. Pressing my palms to the bitumen ground, I was crying with the force of a person vomiting on all fours.
The darkness swirled around me once I realised that she was gone. The silence echoing in my ears was the one constant white noise that I couldn't shut up. My head swam in the fire burning inside, the only smouldering embers of a time where there had been other presences with me, around me, in me. Now, the void has slowly been filled with a cold, howling storm of fear that refused to ever let me up. I was completely and utterly alone in my mind, body and soul.
All because I lost Milly.
I am alone.