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Illustration by Alex Deadman-Wylie
Most nights after dinner, I fill my coat pockets with leftovers — usually whatever survived my toddler’s rapidly shifting standards — or, on particularly desperate evenings, chicken fingers air-fried for the occasion. Not for me. Not for my child. For my dog.
The dog I walk every night — the dog who hates walking.
She is five years old. Black and tan hound mix. Sweet. Loud. Medium-sized. Massive opinions. Her name is Stella and I don’t know how to tell her she’ll be okay.
We’ve lived in the same house since she came home at eight weeks. The same street. The same driveway. And yet, every evening she approaches it all like she’s never seen any of it before and isn’t sure if it’s safe.
She freezes at the end of the front steps. She panics at garbage bins. Once, she ran from an ant and tried to reverse through the fence. Every step is negotiated — one paved slab at a time — delicately brokered with sodium and whispered promises like “just to the corner, I swear.” What I don’t whisper is that I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to help her.
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I have become a woman who carries chicken fingers in her pockets, bribing a 40-pound dog to walk three feet from her own front door.
Stella is terrified of the world. And honestly, lately, I don’t blame her.
Every time I open my phone, the world seems to have gotten a little more broken overnight. There are so many conflicting opinions, so many voices telling me what to believe, that sometimes I just want to bury myself in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and pretend none of it exists. But when I try to feel it all or make sense of it, I get lost and scared and hopeless. Sometimes I feel as frozen as Stella does at the end of our front steps. Some nights it feels like I’m dragging my own heart behind me on a leash — begging it to keep moving.
She’s scared of what she doesn’t understand. Me too. She stops at the shadows. Me too.
She wants to turn around. And sometimes, I do too.
But we go anyway.
Maybe that’s the answer – not the scrolling kind of showing up, but the walking kind. One step at a time, even when the sidewalk feels dangerous.
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She also escorts me to the bathroom. Kisses my face when I cry — which is saying something, considering that for most of her life, the height of affection has been gazing in the same direction as a person at a respective distance. I don’t know how to tell her she’ll be fine, but somehow she knows how to tell me.
We are not a cuddly duo. But we are loyal in the quiet way.
Some people light candles for world peace. I carry frozen chicken nuggets and negotiate with a dog who thinks the sidewalk might be lava. We both show up every night and somehow that feels like the most radical act of hope I can manage right now.
The other day, Stella walked past a plastic bag without incident. A plastic bag! The same dog who still mistakes a dandelion for a threat. If she can learn to trust the world one grocery bag at a time, maybe the rest of us can, too. However, I’m still bringing the chicken fingers, just in case.
Kristan Billing lives in Peterborough, Ont.
