Cordoned

Prologue:
When I was ten years old, my parents – my real, true, living, breathing parents – gave me a puppy as a late birthday present. It was a chipper, spotted thing, always yapping excitedly when I would enter a room he was in, and I began to love it dearly. Then, one day, it got out of the yard after I left for school. You see, I was forgetful like most kids my age, and I forgot to properly latch the gate. My parents both had busy schedules, despite desperately bending them around my own to make sure someone was always home within an hour or so of me getting home to an empty house. Call them paranoid, but they feared that I would somehow set the house on fire with my attempts to cook something on the stove. (Not that I ever needed to. That’s what microwaves were for, right?)
I arrived home after a day of recess and basic math, and I was immediately confronted with a look of utmost grief on my parents’ faces. You’d have thought my baby brother died, if I had one. Which I didn’t.
After asking both of them what was wrong, my well-respected and normally mirthless step-father told me, “Honey, Kimberly, dear, your puppy is dead.”
Just like that. No easy let down, no kind words to describe his passing. Just “dead”.
How? I’m sure you’re eager to know and also very eager to know how this moment is so important as to share in the prologue.
My mother had whimpered, crouched down on the floor beside my step-father and said, so softly, “You know Rebecca? From down the street? Well, while she was playing with her dollies in the yard this afternoon, your puppy approached her, and, well, we’re not sure why, but he bit her.”
“So? The animal cops took him away?”
“No,” my step-father said flatly, “Rebecca’s dad shot the poor mutt.”
My mother began to cry. Full on, heaving and blubbering, but I didn’t. Even at such a young age, I knew this was going to be a defining moment for me. So, with dry eyes, I placed the limp, malformed and bloody body of my brand-new puppy into a box and dug a hole in the side yard. With a flat Sharpie marker I wrote the word “Mutt” on the lid of the box and proceeded to bury it on that cold, late-autumn afternoon.
I had owned that puppy for hardly four months, and I had yet to bestow him with a name. And now, he was dead. Without even a fucking name.
After the dirt was packed flat, I finally let myself weep. It was from that day that I vowed not to love something so easily lost. I let bitterness consume me for whatever reason.
I was still sitting there hours later as it started getting dark, when the neighbor boy and my friend since the earliest of childhood came to my rescue. He lived two houses down, and the neighbor whose yard separated our yards constantly ranted and raved over the fact that his petunias and tulips were constantly getting trampled over the constant jumping of his fence. But in our eyes, he shouldn’t have built that damn fence in the first place.
He walked up to me slowly, kneeled down in the dirt beside me and his pulled me into his strong arms in the most comforting gesture possible. He was two years older than I was, and already, he was experiencing the early onset of puberty.
“It’s alright, Kim,” he whispered.
I sniffled. “It isn’t. He died, Mat. Died because of me.”
“You know,” he said carefully, “my goldfish died today, too. I’d had that sucker for three years; he was bigger than my palm. My mom told me it was because I lef my bedroom window open, and he froze to death. Maybe it was old age, but I still cried.”
I leaned into him, and he told me, “Sometimes, things just happen. It’s not always our faults.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank YOU." He gave me an honest, brotherly smile. "I really loved that goldfish."
We sat there like that until it got very dark, and my mother beckoned me indoors.