Amelia Fielden
Textures
My silky-furred pet dog, whose name meant ‘Snow’, was blind and hard of hearing for the last year of her long life. Yuki had no words to tell me what it was like to depend solely on her senses of smell, touch, and taste.
But her demeanour said it all. Suddenly, the beach no longer appealed. Was it the feel of sand on her nose she came to dislike—or its shifting beneath her paws that disoriented her ?
no more chasing her ball over the dunes, no more racing along the tidelines … Yuki plods, uncertain
So we changed our walks to sniff-able grass and firm concrete paths.
At home, on warmer days, Yuki eschewed the carpets for some area of timber boards close to where I was sitting. Nightly she would rearrange her bed, moving the mattress around, nesting the blankets. Towards the end of her life—though I didn’t know then it was the end—Yuki seemed most comfortable lying on cool, hard, tiles much of the time.
That final afternoon I find her on the bathroom floor. She is breathing, but blood stains her beautiful white plume tail and is pooled on the tiles.
At the vets’ I cushion her with my cardigan while Dr. Joe makes his preparations. A nurse brings in a sapphire-blue velvet rug. I lower Yuki gently from my lap onto its softness … stroke her head as oblivion is pumped into her vein.
on my phone screen she still lies, all white against blue she lies still, curled white on a blue velvet rug
About the Author
Amelia Fielden is Australian. She is a professional Japanese translator and a keen writer of traditional Japanese forms of poetry in English. Her most recent collection is These Purple Years (Ginninderra Press, 2018).