Good Boy
Something lurks in the fields of sprouting wheat. Alexander knows what it could be. He just doesn’t know how to find it.
The farm is on the outskirts of Kyiv. The fields lay fallow when much of the shelling and fighting happened. The grain still sits in the silos from the winter harvest, though. There are plenty of buyers. Plenty of hungry mouths. But there’s no way to get it through the blockade.
It is an issue outside of Alexander’s control. He knows this. Yet, he thinks about it every morning when he looks out over the fields. Soil black as coal. Fertile and wet. He was the keeper of this land. And now he must do his duty to protect it.
Every morning, since the invaders withdrew, Alexander walks with his dog through the fields. When he first started, he thought it’d be easy to see the unwelcome scars of war. He thought bombs would be noticeable in the loamy soil. But as the snow thawed and the rain came down, the earth smoothed out.
Where once a blemish in the earth stood out, everything was evened out by erosion. And even the smallest bomblet from cluster munitions could lie buried just an inch in the pregnant soil.
When Alexander walks his dog through the fields, he now moves methodically. He marks his progress with a wooden stake. On one side of the stake is an arrow pointing up. It also has bits of bright plastic tacked to the top. A flag denoting where he’s left off.
Every morning he walks to the flag. He always walks east to west, west to east. He marks if he ended the day walking toward the sun or away from it by pointing the arrow in the direction he needs to continue.
When Alexander walks out there, he doesn’t know if he’ll come back to the farmhouse the same as he left it. He wonders who will push him around in a wheelchair. If he’ll make it in time to a hospital. If anyone would hear the explosion on the now quiet outskirts of Kyiv.
He walks through the dirt. The young wheat shoots graze his denim pants. His gaze is fixed on the ground. His dog wanders beside him. The dog is a farm dog, agile and similar to a collie but not quite a collie. Alexander feeds him scraps from his dinner. He has seen him eating rats at sundown. He is a good dog.
So when the explosion happened, Alexander was knocked to the ground. All he could see was the sky, the wispy horse-tail clouds blowing across a sea of blue. There was no noise. There was no movement. Just silence for a few seconds. That’s when he knew the good dog had misstepped.
