Little Sweetmeat

“do you remember your brother?” he asks her.

”i prefer not to,” she admits.

and it’s true.  she doesn’t like thinking about him much.  he’s been dead for a while, now, and whenever she thinks back she struggles to remember the exact shade of his eyes; the shape of his muzzle; the color of the markings on his back, the sound of his voice.

what she can remember, though, is how annoying she had found him when they were just pups.  or the way he used to trip over his own paws.  or how his shoulders always shook when he laughed.

sometimes, pups are born that remind her of him, even if they aren’t half as obnoxious.  when she hears pups yelping because of something their siblings did, her mind drifts back to the tricks he used to pull on her to make her do the same.  when her mothers had their third collective litter, one of the pups had had almost the same shade of fur as he’d had.

(that brother is gone, now, too.  not because he’d died, simply because he’d left.)

then a pup goes tumbling out of the nursery, and there’s no time left for reflection.

she has a job to do.