The Throw Pillow
By Robert Hill Long

The sugar ants have no idea a teenage boy has taken over the room that fed them well when a little girl lived there with cookie crumbs and milk spills. They travel old paths on his bedroom walls, to end flattened one by one on his fingertips.

His dog—olfactory lobes a hundred times more attuned than her master’s—won’t sleep in the room tonight: the formic stench too sharp. To her, death smells like death, no matter how tiny the body.

She will lie in the hall on a red throw pillow smelling of when the teenage boy was an infant laid on the pillow for a nap, the dog curled beside him. It was another house, another state: nothing a dog understands, nothing a teenage boy cares to recall.

The boy’s parents could have thrown out the soiled pillow fifteen years ago, but saved it for the dog. For her, the pillow smells of milk ancient and blind as having been a puppy. In this house of her old age, she hardly cares where the other familiar odors went, as long as the sour pillow holds a trace of the baby boy she was born to wait on and watch over.

As for the little girl who once lived here and, without meaning to, took care of the sugar ants with her spills and her crumbs, she is a young woman now, living nearby, in a bigger house.

She dwells in a long thin mirror fastened to her bedroom door, and even there finds herself too wide. With as little as she eats, she could not sustain an ant colony.

The muscular boy who emerges from what was once her nursery bears the acid juice of dead ants on his fingertips; he finds his old guardian asleep on the red pillow he neither remembers nor cares for, and works his hands affectionately into her thick white ruff.

And the fifteen year old dog wakes to this touch. Although her master’s hands smell like death, now, the formic sliver of  that scent barely pierces the paradoxical aroma of their life together: this grown boy who was her human puppy; this maternal being, once his playmate, who sleeps life away on the pillow where he lay as a baby; and the pillow itself, stained and faded, saturated with these mysteries  and red as a heart.