Fear · fiction
The gray dog
A fable: in the north of England, a thin, damp-eyed dog follows a woman everywhere, until her grandson asks why it's so hungry.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
Her fear had the shape of a dog.
Not a fierce dog. A gray dog, thin, with damp eyes, which appeared the day her husband left the house with two suitcases and didn't come back. She was forty-five and lived in a small town in the north of England, where the sky looks like a saucepan lid. She opened the door that morning to put the trash out, and the dog was there, sitting on the step, looking at her.
It came in without asking.
At first, she pretended not to see it. But the dog followed her everywhere. It went with her to the supermarket and stood still in the cereal aisle when she couldn't decide what to buy. It went with her to work and lay at the foot of her desk, and she couldn't concentrate. When the company closed her department, three months later, the dog was there, leaning against her leg, while her boss explained, without meeting her eyes, that it wasn't personal.
That night, the dog climbed onto her bed. It weighed much more than it looked.
She spent months like that. She didn't look for work because the dog wouldn't let her. She didn't call her friends because the dog growled softly when she picked up the phone. She didn't go out after six because the dog stood at the door, motionless, blocking the way.
Until, one Sunday afternoon, her youngest daughter came to visit with her four-year-old grandson.
The boy ran in, stopped in the middle of the living room and looked straight at the dog. No one else could see it. The boy did.
"Grandma, why is this dog so thin?"
She didn't know how to answer. She stood looking at the dog as if she had never seen it. It was true. It was thin, its ribs showing. It trembled a little. The damp eyes weren't threatening. They were hungry.
Then she saw, all at once, what she had never looked at.
She saw the dog as a puppy, in an old house, when she was six and her father shouted in the kitchen. She saw the dog growing up with her, hidden, through the school years, the marriage, the births, every move. It had always been there. It only appeared when she needed it. It didn't want to imprison her. It wanted to protect her. That was what it knew how to do: stand at the door so nothing bad could get in. The problem was that, protecting so much, it also didn't let anything good get out.
Fear, she understood, wasn't an enemy. It was a hungry dog no one had ever fed.
She went to the kitchen, filled one bowl with water and another with whatever there was, and set them on the floor. The dog looked at her, wary. Then it ate. It ate everything. And, when it was done, it lay down on the kitchen rug and slept. Slept deeply, like something that hadn't slept in years.
On Monday, she woke early. The dog was still there, smaller. She put on her shoes, opened the door, and it didn't stand in front of her. It came behind her, beside her, trotting, like a dog keeping someone company.
She went to the town's public library and asked about courses. The dog sat beside her chair, quiet.
Since then, she hasn't gotten rid of the fear. She has learned to feed it every morning. A little attention, a little conversation, a little patience. In return, it has become a good guard dog: it warns her when there's real danger, and stays quiet when there isn't.
Her grandson, when he visits, plays with it in the garden.
Bairo says that, after one of his most painful falls, he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. Not as an open wound. As a floor. Read: No is the foundation of yes.
The way forward
Fear is often a protector no one has listened to; ask what it's trying to guard. Feed it with small steps instead of waiting for it to leave on its own. If fear hasn't let you leave the house for a long time, talking to a mental health professional is a step worth taking.