Sadly, you have somewhere to be

The metallic lift doors opened. António stepped into the lobby, onto the chequered floor of red, grey, and black granite. He crossed it and pushed through the front door.

Heat struck the bare skin of his arms and legs.

He sat on the patch of grass opposite the block of flats and waited for Matilde. His mother’s aloe vera rose above the first-floor balustrade, its spotted green arms and hard spines against the pink ceramic tiles of the façade.

To the right, at the bedroom window, Yuna appeared: first the eyes, then the black nose, then the folded ears at the top of her long head. Each time he left the flat, she ran there to watch him. She stood upright on her back legs, front paws resting on the ledge.

When she was small and round, she cried so much at night that he would lift her into bed beside him. He had named her. That winter and spring, he was at home with her almost every day. By the following summer, when he left to study abroad, she had lengthened into an athletic blue whippet. Years later, whenever he returned, she still slipped beneath his sheets and followed him from room to room.
Matilde came into view from behind the yellow building at the corner.

“I’m glad I caught you,” she said.

She held him for a moment. She smelled of tuberose, jasmine, and honeysuckle. He had known her since school. Even then, butterflies moved along her arms, stars at the throat, flowers along the ribs. Her body had altered over the years without becoming unfamiliar. Now she wore a strapless silver dress embroidered with blue daisies. A fresh swallowtail on her forearm lay beneath a clear bandage.

“Oscar wouldn’t believe me,” António said, glancing up at the first floor. “Look. She’s still there.”

Matilde looked up and raised a hand.

Yuna sprang higher behind the glass.

They began to walk along the track lined with mature tulip trees. Their shade shifted lightly across the path.

“She sits on the couch alone now,” António said. “Watching television like a person.”
Matilde listened. “And she refuses her reflection. Every time I hold her in front of a mirror, she turns her head away.”

“Perhaps she knows something.”

He smiled, then the smile passed.

“No. What happened last night wasn’t ordinary. Or maybe I’m the one becoming strange.”

They sat on a stone bench facing an old fountain. Cherubs rode swans around the basin, their horns releasing thin streams of water.

“You know I won’t laugh,” Matilde said. “Tell me.”

“When she saw the suitcase on the bed, she knew.”

Matilde did not speak.

“She slowed down. Her head dropped. Then she came over and pressed it here.”

He touched his shoulder.

“I started crying. And then she—”

He stopped. Matilde waited.

“She sang?” she said quietly.

He looked at her.

“Yes.”

“What was her voice like?”

“Low,” he said. “Very low. I wrote it down this morning.”

He unfolded a sheet of paper from the pocket over his chest. As he read, Matilde felt the skin beneath the bandage on her forearm stir.

Yuna always…
Wants to see a dream.
What I’m thinking,
I want to try and put in a poem,
So my little heart
can reach out to you a little. *

When he finished, he kept looking at the page.

The fountain continued spilling into itself.

After a while, Matilde held out her hand. He gave her the paper. She read it once, then folded it carefully and returned it to him.

“She wanted you to carry something,” she said.

He looked down at the grass.

“I already do.”

From the block behind them came the sound of Yuna barking once. Then again, softer this time, as if from farther inside the flat.

* poem adapted from a 1982 song by Matsuda Seiko