MERRILY THOMPSON AND THE BLACK DOG

            It was during the second year of the Great Pandemic when Merrily Thompson noticed her hearing had quickened. There was no precise moment. The realization had come upon her gradually.

            Now, before the two neighbor women arrive, before the bell rings and the windowed door clicks and the blinds rattle, she can hear their voices adrift across the common garden.

            “Even a recluse must get lonely.”                                                   

            Merrily Thompson takes issue. “I had friends once. Didn’t reap me much benefit.”

            Her visitors are younger than she by many years. They’re confident and fit. Pragmatic and no-nonsense. They wear hiking shorts and aqua paper masks. The masks serve as outward symbols of their caring but do nothing to control their viral broadcasts for Merrily Thompson’s vision too, has over the past year, become acute. She can spot a virus across a room!

            “It’s those little globes with the knobbed red offshoots.” Merrily Thompson grimaces.

            Today, the old woman serves her visitors Oolong tea in squatty English China cups. She’s wearing her 1920’s red and white polka-dot swimming costume and her purple ghillies with the black velvet lacing-ribbons. The ghillies are festooned with lime silk blossoms.

            “Have you thought of adopting a kitten?” one of the women suggests.

            “I’ve never really liked kittens,” Merrily Thompson responds. “Kittens cause my nose to drip. And have you ever smelt a litter box? Have you ever had the delightful occasion of stepping in that stuff?” Then, lest her words appear so argumentative as to drive the women away (for she’s come to value their visits, however intrusive, as priceless gifts) she adds: “I reckon a kitten beats the hell out of a chicken.”

            “Yes, Ma’am,” says one of the women. “I reckon it does.”

            “I had a chicken once,” says Merrily Thompson. “Back when I was with the “Up with People” people. I walked a rope stretched between two high poles, and wearing this very same outfit, believe it or not. I balanced a ruffled umbrella in one hand and a chicken wearing pink underpants in the other.”

            “You don’t say.”

            Long after the women depart, their wondering drifts back to her like a whisper of leaves: “Do you think she knows up from down?”

            Merrily Thompson finds satisfaction in third person: “Of course, she knows up from down, it’s simply that when speaking, she sometimes rearranges the facts, as a charlatan might, steering others onto wrongful paths, meaningless paths, by spotlighting irrelevant clues while obscuring the pertinent ones, the ones most needful to be considered. These, she casts in deep shadow, or at least, deprives of adequate light. It’s a way to pull the wool over unsuspecting eyes.”

            “Perhaps she’s simply lacking in social graces.” And Merrily Thompson debates: Ought she have told her visitors some different tale instead? Something a fraction tamer than a tale about a chicken in pink underpants? She takes a mental survey, listing all her tales, from the most extravagant to the lowest in tone, sorting them, before deciding on which for tomorrow.

            “Social graces, indeed,” she gripes, because there’ve always been those who’ve questioned the value of her upbringing, those who’ve attributed her any failings to the parental failings of her long-departed parents. Then, “Quite understandable,” she admits, knowing that, at times, she’s absolutely compelled to say the wrong things… although she’d certainly rather not.

            She wants to say the right things and it could be, she does say the right things, but simply to the wrong people, or even to the right people, but at the wrong times, or perhaps, even at the right times but in the wrong ways. Maybe she doesn’t supply sufficient background information, or perhaps she uses the wrong inflections or places emphasis on the wrong words. Could it be her pauses are too long?

            The old woman peeks out beyond the window blinds to be amazed. Her visitors, voices in tow, have vanished, but it seems they’ve left something behind. A dog! A medium-sized, barrel-chested, black dog!

            “Dogs pass the least judgement,” says Merrily Thompson.

            This dog has webbed feet and too many useless folds. It looks to be a fairly prickle-coated dog, most probably, allergenic. Its tail, like a boomerang, backtracks upward, revealingly. Its small stubborn ears are downturned at the tips. Its troubled brow casts a foreboding shadow over the myopic scowl of a Gargoyle.

            The dog rolls and Merrily Thompson can see its down-side up, its hind-part before, its belly like the belly of a fish, darkly prismatic in an easy shaft of morning and she’s reminded of an artist’s gothic swirling, starred by a golden flickering of light.

            “Stay! Please stay!” And rushing to her couch, Merrily Thompson kneels beside it and thrusts her boney hand under, and with her whole thin arm begins to rake and to fling through the tumble of miscellany cast there: A sat-on hat; a box of left-over Christmas; a rag-taggle little book about an Emperor’s clothes, scribbled on when she was in third grade; a small cache of broken baubles, many pieces still splendidly reflective, others less so, but all of potential good use. And there: A hardly disturbed roll of aluminum wrapping and when she discovers that, she begins to fashion!

            A tiara! Merrily Thompson fashions a tiara, beribboned and bejeweled, while outside, a strange black dog rolls in the troll-haired moss.

             “Stay!” And the coronated Merrily Thompson ventures out into the open world for the first time in nearly 400 days.

            The dog is lying chest down; its hippopotamus head triangled between wide forepaws; its origami face, folded and squashed; its elliptical eyes, Spartan and stoic. Its deep-set eyes darkly concerned.

             “Would you like me to tell you a story?”

            And she begins by recounting what she remembers. Stories. Bizarre stories. Improper stories. Stories of unreliable resource. Entirely impossible stories made real only by her confidence in telling them and by her swearing on them as God’s truth.

            Without moving, the dog looks up into her face; its almond eyes gone curiously amber now beneath the tragic brow.

            Merrily Thompson winks. With her tongue in her cheek, she curtsies deep, and lifting her knees higher than any old woman dare, she tips her tiara and parades herself before the dog.

Ceille Baird Welch, B.A., M.Ed., D.A. (HON) is a native of Moncks Corner, SC although she and her husband Jim (SCETV's NatureScene) called Columbia their home for over 40 years. Ceille is known primarily for her work for stage performance. Her complete body of work is housed in The Poetry Archives of James B. Duke Library at Furman University. Ceille and Jim, both recipients of The Lucy Hampton Bostic Award now live in a log cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains with their Shar Pei pup, "St. John Smythe."