Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

There is a dog across the fence that barks at the space where the fence is not a fence but a suggestion, and I sat there on the back steps for maybe an hour watching it perform this devotion to the empty yard, (*Author's note: this is chapter fourteen's opening image, I am stealing it, the dog is Gabriel, the fence is the thing he cannot say*) and the September light was doing that amber thing where everything looks like it is already a memory of itself, and I thought: this is what his grief looks like when no one is watching, this is the barking at the nothing that is still something because you chose to bark at it.