Dead Dog in a Time Machine
December 12, 2021
I’m up to my neck with all the love I never got to give you. I don’t know how to give it back.
A bubble from the beige water jug behind the pews rises in rhythm with the gasps from your mother. My black jacket still smells like smoke. My hands are cold and vacant by my side.
December 12, 1995
“Why do I have to be on the truck?” I said, whining and cold.
“It’s the Santa Clause parade. Your grandparents want to see you, and there is a friend I want you to meet,” said my father, buttoning up my blue snowsuit. It was too big and still smelled like my older brother and I hated it. We drove to Lindsay. I kicked my father’s seat, I stared out the window, my brothers fought, the seatbelt rubbed too hard against my neck.
The bed of my uncle’s pickup truck was laced in red cloth and a flimsy Ho Ho Ho gold banner wrapped around it. My father picked me up and sat me down and told me to be good. Behind me, my brothers stood and chucked candy canes at people passing by. A girl lifted herself up beside me. Her hair was smooth and long and I had never seen a kid wear glasses before. She looked at me, then back at my brothers—unbothered by a stranger on our truck—and at me again.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Renée!” Someone called from beside the truck. A woman with the same long hair stood next to my father, her arm wrapped around his elbow and waved with the other to the girl next to me. Renée waved back shyly. She looked back again at my brothers, this time throwing candy canes as far as they could.
“Do you like chocolate?” She asked, looking back at me. In her small hands she held four Ferrero Rochers. It wasn’t until I was alone again some thirty years later that I realized that was the beginning of my life.
December 2, 2021
We met the night before everything to celebrate my father’s birthday. I had just moved back in after my divorce, and you came back from Vancouver to be with us. Even though we told you not to, you still came back to Ontario for one night. In my old room, now filled with remnants of my marriage, I peeled back an old calendar to reveal a hole in the wall.
“Remember when we tried to do handstands and you fell into the wall?” I asked, peeling away the decade-old calendar. She didn’t look at me, but stood in the doorway and gaped, still and stoically at my windowsill.
“What?” I asked, looking around for something indecent left out.
“Your plant is dead,” she said deadpan.
“Oh, yeah I guess it is,” I said and picked off a dried leaf.
“Why did you let it die?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t notice it was dying.”
After dinner, we stood outside of a makeshift stone firepit in the backyard passing back and forth a joint you kept hidden. Even at 32, you were still scared my father would find out you smoked. The house sat above a hill. In the dark, the glow of the kitchen sliced between the trees. The river flowed both ways behind us, a dog barked in the distance.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said after handing it back to me.
“Where?” I asked as I exhaled.
“Colorado. My church is doing a conference there.”
“Since when did you join a church?”
“I’ve kind of always thought about joining one.”
“Okay but why? I’m not judging—well maybe a little. But you’ve never been religious. It’s just a bit weird and sudden to convert and now out of nowhere, you’re just leaving? I mean this is the first I’m hearing about this. Have you really bathed in the blood of Christ and all that?”
“Yeah, I mean, what if we’ve been wrong about religion? I don’t want to find out too late, you know,” I looked at her funny. Her eyes glared up at me over her glasses from across the fire. The black beanie and jacket buried every part of her in the night. Only her pale face, shadowed by the smoke was proof that she was actually here. When Renee was a teenager, she used to sit so still I sometimes forgot she was there.
“You’re not sick or anything, right?” I said, throwing another stick onto the fire. I watched it snap in the flame.
“Not now, no. But I could be, in the future.”
“Okay but you’re not, so I don’t get why you’re in such a rush to do this. You’ve literally never even been to a church before. You were goth for a minute in high school. You have to admit this is weird. Like, you get why I’m surprised, right?”
“You worry too much. And you’re too pale, you need to get out more,” she said.
“It’s December?”
“Still. You look sick.”
“I really don’t think out of the two of us I’m the one acting weird, Renée,” I said.
“I didn’t say you’re acting weird, I just worry about you because I love you. You know that I love you, right? Even when I’m in Colorado.”
“Can we just enjoy the fire and have a nice night? I don’t know why you’re talking about this.”
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“Thank you,” I said sharply. We stood across from each other as the fire suffocated itself to an almost invisible glow. “I just wish you would have told me before that you were leaving.”
“Why?” She said after a beat.
“Because I would have gone with you.”
December 12, 2021
“Renée Burns will be remembered as a loving daughter, friend, and sister….” The priest went on. This isn’t a Catholic funeral. You never joined any church. But, if you did meet God, ask him to bring you back to me.
July, 2006
Your room was always my favourite place to be with you. On the second floor, it had that hideous wallpaper that was an off shade of yellow and was constantly peeling in the worst spots. I wanted to be you so bad. I remember sitting in front of your mirror as you taught me how to put my hair in a bun and practicing my smile when I stole your eyeshadow on the weekends you were gone. I wore your perfume and tried on your clothes that were four years too big for me. I wanted to be you even when you stopped letting me in that room.
We were sitting in your room when we saw the neighbour’s dog get hit by a car. You were Skyping your friends and I was listening out of frame with my feet propped up against the arch ceiling on your bed. I remember trying to be so quiet thinking if I laughed, you would kick me out. I can’t remember what you were talking about, but do I remember when we heard the tires screech and the thud that echoed through your open window. The car drove off, but we ran to the street together, and watched the golden lab bleed out onto the gravel road. I started crying. We were the only ones home and I didn’t know what to do. I looked to you as you bent down and patted the dog as it whined and looked around in a panic. I remember its eyes stopped swirling when you put your hand on its head and sat down next to it. There was nothing we could have done to save that dog, but I was so angry at you for not doing something to save it. You just sat next to this dog and watched it die.
I still don’t understand why you didn’t try to save it.
December 12, 2021
You’re having an open casket funeral. “Sleeping Pills Make the Cleanest Cadaver: Ten Tips for Mortuary College ” I read on Facebook when I Googled how it feels to overdose. I look at the casket now, oak with gold flaps and screws and I know you are lying in there with fake rouge and your implants to make you look not as dead as you really are. I look at this box and I hope you were in pain when you killed yourself, and I laugh because I know I shouldn’t wish my sister was in pain when she died. But my sister did die and somehow I think you passed your pain onto me, so I hope this inherited grief you left for me hurt when you decided I would be your anchor.
Our family stands around your body and they cry into each other’s shoulders and all I can think is how angry you would be that this is what brought our families together. Your mother and my father got divorced years ago, my mother hates your mother, and my father hates your father. My brothers stopped talking to each other but here they are telling stories of you as if you could hear them but Colorado is too far to listen.
Outside of the window, red and white floats pass by. I hear the jingle of the parade and my jacket still smells like smoke and I don’t know how to be here without you. I walk through the funeral home and onto the street. There is too much love left inside me. I walk like an eclipse through the brightly coloured families on the sidewalk. I move until I find a flatbed truck with an inflatable snowman and I lay down on top of it, crushing it entirely. I let the vehicle carry me and I let the people stare. My jacket still smells like smoke and you are still dead. We will never be sisters again.
I carry this expired love with me; I am alone again.
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Abbigale Kernya is a third-year English literature student specializing in creative writing at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Having grown up in a large blended family, she has an obsessive need to explore the boundaries of family through literature and enjoys writing about the love shared between her and her step-sister. Abbigale has previously been published in Absynthe Magazine and in the Lilith edition of Arthur Newspaper. Abbigale is the Coordinating Editor of Arthur Newspaper and Managing Editor of KBI Inspire Magazine where she focuses on uplifting student and community writing. She is also an editor for Trent University’s 2024 Anthology of Student Writing: Chickenscratch.
This story is dedicated to her sister, Taylor Maggie.
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