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eyes.
     
    #
     
    I get up and Sandy is there. I live in Aunt Rose’s house now, though it isn’t her house any longer. It’s mine. He comes running when I go downstairs and tries to lick my face. I feel sad, or irritated, depending on my mood, and then I go out and the last thing I see is his head tilted to one side, surprised to see me leaving him all over again. I get back and he’s there, tail wagging—I can hear it, beating the radiator by the door—and it begins again.
    The thing I see, though, when I look at him, is Aunt Rose. Aunt Rose, little bigger than a doll, her limbs desiccated, covered by a single sagging sheet. Her eyes lolling back in their hollowed sockets, the emptiness in them. The nothing in them. It was the only thing left that she had really wanted, and once I gave it to her—once I opened the bag and leaned towards her and let her look inside—I guess she’d done.
    It had been hard to cut. He wouldn’t hold still, for one thing, and I couldn’t see what I was doing because the fur on his neck was longer than that on his head. It was still golden though, and it spilled over my fingers. He licked me when I got hold of his collar. He tried to jump up at me, excited, not understanding.
    It wasn’t easy to cut; I think I said that, but it really wasn’t.
    I thought I’d have to make an awful choice for him one day , she’d said. And I remembered the relief on her face when she’d said it. I understood it. I took one look, and I understood.
    I couldn’t see for crying.
    Make him love you , Mum had said, and I had. The awful thing was, I loved him too. I took a knife to his neck and I pushed it in. The noise he made was terrible. Pain, yes. But mostly, it was the sound of betrayal.
    It didn’t kill him, not at first. He bucked in my hands, and the knife slipped out. It took me a while to gather myself. He struggled. It was a while before I could do it again.
    When Aunt Rose looked inside the bag, at first, she didn’t do anything. She just froze, me trying to hold it steady so that she could see his eyes, not the bloody part, the matted fur, just those adoring eyes—and her own eyes swivelled and she looked at me. She looked at me for a horrified second before she opened her mouth—to form words or take a breath, I wasn’t sure which—and then she started to claw at her chest.
    Aunt Rose didn’t get better. She didn’t come home. She did get to see her dog, though, or what remained of him, before she died. I didn’t want to do it, but he was a big dog. He wasn’t a dog that would fit under a coat or in a bag. Not all of him, anyway.
    Sandy comes to greet me whenever I get home. He wraps himself around my legs, and on some level, I can feel his touch, though the house never smells of dog any more. It doesn’t smell of him because he isn’t really there. I remind myself of that whenever I look into his eyes and see the adoration written in them. Sometimes the cruellest thing a creature can give you is love. I’d rather see her . Aunt Rose, the last look she ever gave me, her face twisted in pain and her eyes—the coldness in them. The hatred. It’s what I deserve, but I tell myself; it’s what she deserved too.
    The dog was only caught between us.
    There’s no end to his love. It’s capacious; it’s infinite. It was the first thing I was told about him, and it was true, and every day I’m surprised to see that it’s true. You’d think both of us would have got used to it by now, but we haven’t. I don’t think I ever will, and that’s a pity, because I have the feeling we’re going to be living together for a long, long time.

FUNERAL RITES
    Helen Marshall
     
    Her home university in Toronto was notoriously cheap when it came to travel budgets and, though Nora was something of an experienced traveller, she was still possessed of a certain naiveté—or, rather, disregard—when it came to subjects outside her field of expertise, a trait not entirely uncommon in her