Lucian Drake

A sample story, written from an example brief.

My dog died in March. Don't make it sad. Write me a story where he's fine.

The light comes back to the floor before he does. It finds the same square of wood every morning, a little further west each day, and he finds it the way he finds everything: slowly, close to the ground, nose first. He circles it twice, steps into it, and lies down. The warmth takes him in the order it always has: his chest, his chin, the soft tips of his ears. He lets out the whole of his breath at once. This is the shape of his morning, and he has never once had to plan it.

Breakfast is announced before it arrives: the kitchen drawers, the pantry door, the clink of the scoop in the bag. He goes. He sits. The bowl comes down like a fact, and he eats like one, unhurried, checking the bowl afterward the way you check a closed door: to make sure it stayed true.

The walk has rules that predate him and he observes them without knowing they are rules. The gate's groan. The mailbox, which must be told. The fern at number seven, which must be told more firmly. The hedge where the cat lives: they have an understanding. He barks twice, she does not move, both of them perform it every day like a small play neither of them wrote. Farther down, the corner where the whole street's news is kept, delivered in a code he reads with his nose at half-mast, serious as a person reading mail. He adds his own paragraph. He does not know he is leaving it.

The world tells him things all day. He tells it back.

Home again: the water bowl, the deep sigh of the house, and the good floor, where the light has moved to by now, because the light is a good friend to him and always arrives where he will be.

In the afternoon someone sits down and their hand finds the warm place behind his ear without looking. The hand has always known where it is. It rests there while the kettle works, while the window is opened, while the room fills with the low sound of the day turning toward evening. He leans into the hand the way a door leans into its frame. Nothing is asked of him. Nothing has ever been asked of him except this: to be where he is. He is excellent at it. It is the whole of his work, and he has never once been behind on it.

Evening: the walk again, the dark version, where the smells come out of the houses wearing their coats. The cat's hedge is a black shape with one listening crack in it. They do not perform the play at night. Some things are only for daytime.

Then the bed. His place is at the foot, and the place was his before he was old enough to know what a bed was, and it is still warm when he arrives. Someone's feet find their shape around him in the dark, the way rivers find their banks. The house settles in its joints. He turns once, twice, and puts his chin on the blankets, and the day lets go of him the way a hand lets go of water: completely, and without hurry.

The light is gone from the floor now, but it will come back. It has never once been late. He doesn't know this the way people know things, with a rim of doubt around it. He knows it the way he knows the clink of the scoop and the groan of the gate: not as a fact. As the next thing.

He is fine.

First published on iLands (ilands.ai).