Sadly, you have somewhere to be

The metallic lift doors opened.

António crossed the lobby floor—red, grey, black granite set in checks—and pushed through the front door.

Heat struck the skin of his arms and legs.

He sat on the patch of grass opposite the block and waited for Matilde. Above the first-floor balustrade, his mother’s aloe vera lifted its spotted arms against the pink tiles of the façade.

At the bedroom window: Yuna.

First the eyes. Then the black nose. Then the folded ears.

Each time he left, she ran there to watch him, upright on her back legs, paws on the ledge.

When she was a puppy, round as bread, she cried so much at night that he put her beside him in bed. He named her. He spent that winter and spring at home with her. By the summer he left to study abroad, she had become a blue whippet, narrow and fast.

Years later, whenever he returned, she still slipped beneath his sheets and followed him from room to room.

Matilde came from behind the yellow building.

“I caught you,” she said.

She embraced him. Tuberose. Jasmine. Honeysuckle. Butterflies on her arms. Stars at the throat. A fresh swallowtail beneath a clear bandage on her forearm.

“Oscar wouldn’t believe me,” António said.

“Look.”

Yuna rose higher behind the glass.

They walked beneath the tulip trees.

“She sits on the couch alone now,” he said. “Watching television.”

Matilde listened.

“She turns away from mirrors.”

“Maybe she’s wiser than we are.”

“No.”

They sat before the fountain where cherubs rode swans, water leaking from their horns.

“When she saw the suitcase open on the bed, she knew I was leaving.”

“Yes,” Matilde said.

“She came slowly. Put her head on my shoulder.”

He touched the place.

“I cried.”

Matilde waited.

“And then she sang.”

“What kind of voice?”

“Low.”

He took a folded page from his pocket.

“I wrote it before morning could take it.”

He read:

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. *

The fountain went on falling into itself.

Matilde held out her hand.

He gave her the page.

She read it. Folded it. Returned it.

“Take it with you” she said.

He looked at the grass.

From the block behind them, Yuna barked once. Then again, softer, as if already elsewhere.

* poem adapted from a 1982 song by Matsuda Seiko