We Four

Image by Gemini AI

Fiction

Every evening, just before the streetlights came alive, they would gather outside my gate.

First came the brown one with a torn ear. Then the limping black dog. Finally, the smallest, white with muddy patches, always keeping a respectful or suspicious distance until I spoke.

“Come,” I would say. That was all they needed.

Now they come without invitation. My house has become their home too.

I don’t know their names. I never named them myself. Naming creates hope. Hope demands permanence. At 66, after a lifetime of losing people, I have learnt not to expect permanence from anyone.

The neighbours said they were stray dogs. I knew better.

I am a retired schoolteacher. For forty years I taught young minds that life rewarded honesty, hard work and patience. It was a lesson I believed with all my heart, even though my own life stubbornly refused to prove it.

Failure never arrived dramatically. It seldom does. It came quietly, one poor decision at a time. Pride when humility was needed. Silence when an apology would have healed. Anger disguised as principle. Dreams pursued long after they had become burdens. Every crossroads offered me a chance to become a better husband, a more understanding father, a wiser man. Somehow, I always chose the road that led farther from those I loved.

Did I do it consciously? I don’t think so. There’s Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist winking at me from my bookshelf. I love that book for some reason I didn’t think of yet. Fatalism? Maybe. Jacques insisted that everything written on “the great scroll above” must happen. Was my life a slow unfolding of a script already written, or did I compose it myself through a thousand avoidable mistakes? If fate had dealt the cards, why did every loss bear the unmistakable imprint of my own … hubris? stubbornness? genes?

If everything was my doing, why did some invisible force seem always to nudge me towards the worst possible choice?

Even now, in the autumn of my life, I cannot answer. I know that Jacques would call my story inevitable. The teacher in me, however, continues to believe that another lesson, another decision, might have once changed the ending. Maybe, a new decision can be made even now, at this moment.

My wife left me long ago. It may be more correct to say that I left her. Because she wanted that. And I loved her enough to respect her wish. I still love her, though we have never talked to each other for decades. My sons wish me on my birthday.

We were a happy family once upon a time. Like in a fairy tale.

My wife loved our sons with a fierce, almost frightened devotion. Love, for her, was not something to be shared but something to be possessed. Whenever the boys ran to me with their report cards or their little triumphs, I would catch a shadow crossing her face. She wanted to be the first person they sought, the last person they hugged before sleeping, the one whose opinion mattered most. There was room in her heart for all of us, but she could never believe there was room in ours for more than one.

We were four but one. Now we are four separate lives living in four different corners of the country. Do we all orbit the same memories? I wonder. I hope.

 Now, these three dogs wait for me every evening with a faith my own family no longer possesses. These creatures don’t ask why I live alone. They never judge the long silences that fill the house. They are happy with whatever food I share with them. They accept my stories with the attention only the lonely can give.

Looking at them, I smile at the strange arithmetic of life.

Once, we four shared a dining table. Now, we four sit beneath a fading sky: an ageing man and three homeless dogs, each carrying wounds that no one else can see.