Martha Speaks - To Death - 2 Parts

"Helen! I changed my mind! Don't go!" cried Martha, as Helen climbed into the driver's seat of her second-hand Buick LeSabre.

"Now Martha, we've discussed this. I have to go. If I don't go, I'll never get another opportunity like this again," said Helen, as she pushed Martha's paws off her her lap. "You don't want me to end up stuck in Wagstaf City for the rest of my life, do you?"

"No, but..." stuttered Martha, her paws dancing nervously on the pavement.

"No buts. I have to leave or I'll miss my flight," she said as she began to pull the car door closed. "I... I'll miss you, Martha, but they won't let me have a pet in the dorms. Now step back," she said. "I don't want to close your tail in the door."

"I love you, Helen," said Martha, before she stepped away.

"I love you too, you crazy dog. I'll miss you. I'll visit you every summer, okay?"

Reluctantly, Martha took another step back, hanging her head, her tail drooping between her back legs. If dogs could cry, there would have been tears blurring her vision. Helen closed the door and turned the ignition. The car sputtered to life before she rolled down the window.

"Goodbye," said Martha quietly, as Helen put the car in gear and drove away.

When she was gone, Martha sighed and went to lay down in front of the front door of the house. Helen wouldn't be back until Winter Break, almost five months away. Five months was almost two dog years. She wasn't going to see Helen again, she knew. She might not have that much time before...

Small dogs could live twenty human years. Larger breeds, like herself, might get ten or fifteen human years before they met their ultimate end. Martha was now seventeen years old, and she wasn't getting any younger. The cancer inside her was weakening her body every day. She knew she wasn't going to last until Winter Break.

It didn't matter, though. Helen had been given a full-ride scholarship to one of the most prestigious veterinary schools in the country. She had to go, because an opportunity like this might come only once in a lifetime. The only trouble with that was this school was on the other side of the country, and there was no way Martha would be allowed to live in the dorms with her.

Helen had to choose between spending Martha's last days in Wagstaf City, or the bright future that extended out beyond Martha, Wagstaf and everything that had been before. It pained Martha to see Helen stuck with such a difficult choice, and it hurt even more that Helen hadn't chosen to stay with her until the end.

In the past few years, Martha had come to the realization that humans lived many times longer than dogs. Helen had to plan for a future that could last eight or ten times an average dog's life. One day soon, she knew, Helen was going to have to go on and on and on without her.

Why did that day have to be today, though? She still had a little life in her, and she hated the idea of spending the last few months of that life without the person she loved the most.

Martha knew that compared to the humans, she was a simple, honest creature. Usually, she said what was on her mind. Most of what she thought about was food and family, so she never had to hold anything back, even after the day she had taken her first bite of Granny's Alphabet Soup, and the humans suddenly understood her.

Now that the end was near, she found herself hiding her true feelings from the ones she loved the most. Even though they weren't dogs, Martha loved them instinctually, as if they were her pack. It pained her to keep things from them. Hiding your inner thoughts from the pack was a deep betrayal of their trust. Amongst dogs, this kind of behavior would have made the others send her into exile.

The humans hardly seemed to notice. After all of the millions of years of instinctual communal wisdom Martha had shared with them, they still didn't seem to understand what she was really saying. They were all like little fortresses, walled off from the rest of life-kind and even one another. No wonder it took a miracle to make them hear her words at all.

Magic doesn't exist, she knew. Helen had told her so several times since the day that conversations between the two of the them became possible.

What she wished for now was another miracle. She wanted...

Martha had to admit she didn't know what she wanted. This sense of being conflicted was utterly new to her. Dogs weren't conflicted creatures. Most dogs always knew what they wanted, and expressed these needs without hesitation. If the need wasn't immediately met, most of the dogs she knew were willing to be satisfied what they could get, or wait forever.

But Martha didn't have forever, and she knew it.

The universe had given her a miraculous gift, one that had never been granted to any creature since The Great Rift, and one that might never be given to any creature after. She felt like it was being greedy to ask for anything more than this. In her heart, though, this is what she desired above all else.

Martha stood and stretched. She wished she still had Skits around to talk to. He had always been a lummox, but he was also the gentlest companion Martha could have asked for. He could have comforted her in the ways she needed. He had always had a knack for smoothing out the conflicts that arose from mixing so closely with the humans. But he had died three years ago.

When he was still alive, he would have curled up beside her, his warm, boney back pressed against hers, and he would have whispered The Tales to her until she slept. It was what dogs had done for ten thousand years, for uncounted generations. In those early months, before the humans had dragged her, yipping and crying away from her mother the very last time, before she was sold to a pet shop in the city, then resold and eventually abandoned to her fate by an unkind master, her mother had whispered The Tales to her and the others as they crouched there in the dim cage at the puppy-mill.

Skits would have told her The Two-Tailed Puppy, which was always her favorite. He would have laughingly told The Dog Who Wore Clothes, because it had reminded him of Martha. He would have shivered though The Wolf-Dog, which always terrified him. As she drifted off to sleep, he would have whispered the epic tale of The Great Rift, which told of all the things the humans had lost since that day, more than ten thousand years ago, when they stopped understanding the speech of other creatures and started overtaking the world. He had kept her in line, reminding her time and again that no matter how human she felt, she was first and always a dog.

Without Skits, and now without Helen, she felt the despair driving deep, like an arrow in her heart.

"Martha!" Helen's mother cried through the back door of the house. "It's food time!"

Martha paced slowly into the back, and pushed through the doggy door that led into the kitchen.

"I gave you an extra helping today," said Helen's mother gently. "Before you eat, you need to take your medication, please."

Martha stood patiently and waited for Helen's mother to push the pill deep into a glob of waiting peanut butter. Peanut butter had always been Martha's favorite treat, and it was the only way she would ever agree to swallow any of the dusty, bitter-smelling pills the humans called 'medicine'.

"Here you go," she said brightly, and set a paper plate down on the floor in front of her. "Hurry up and take your medicine, Martha."

Martha ate the peanut butter without tasting it. Somewhere inside, she knew there was a bitter pill that contained a substance meant to help her fight off the cancer. When she was done, she went and sat before her bowl of soup. For the first time ever, she didn't have the slightest urge to eat it.

It had been sixteen human years since the puppy-mill, fifteen of which she'd spent here, and twelve years since the humans had suddenly started to hear her voice.

To them, it was shocking to hear Martha speak, even though, from her own perspective, she had always had a voice of her own. Most dogs didn't even bother trying to speak to their owners, because it was well-known that humans were deaf to the cries of other creatures. Martha had always been different in that respect. She insisted on talking to them directly as if they weren't deaf, even before she was understood. (A practice for which the other dogs had taunted her mercilesssly.) Martha wondered if things might have been the same if she had been a typical dog. Maybe, no one would have noticed her new ability simply because she never would have used it in their presence.

The humans had immediately tried to pinpoint a logical cause for this dog, this simple creature, this beast, suddenly being granted the power of human speech. Eventually, they landed on the notion that it was the leftover alphabet soup they gave her the night before. No one was ever absolutely sure what had happened, but over time, they grew accustomed to Martha's speech. And, based on some of the things that happened later, it did seem that the soup had something to do with it.

"I don't think I'm hungry today," she said, emerging from her thoughts.

"At least have a bite," said Helen's mother.

"No. Put it in the fridge for now. I'll eat it later, okay?" said Martha, before she padded back through the kitchen and into the back yard.

The peanut butter was enough to keep her sated until later. She wasn't sure if she really wanted to eat the soup anymore. She wasn't sure she actually liked her miraculous capacity for human speech. In the last few months, it had caused her nothing but pain. Maybe, it might be better to allow herself to be what she had always been, a dog, no more, no less.

Martha's nose caught an unfamiliar scent, and she whipped her head around to see where it was coming from.

"Psst!" chattered a voice somewhere on the other side of the fence.

"Hello?" said Martha. "Who's there?"

"Want to chase?" chattered a squirrel voice.

"I do. But I don't think I have it in me anymore," she sighed.

Wierd. What squirrel actually asked to be chased?

There was a skittering, scratching sound as the squirrel climbed the fence post and sat on top. She'd never seen a squirrel quite like this one before. He was fat, and his pitch black fur glistened in the sun, like someone had combed oil into him. His lithe, bottle-brush shaped tail was black, too, except for the very tip, which was a pearly white color.

His tiny black eyes sparkled with intelligence. He sat there, perched up on his hind legs, staring at her. After a while, Martha started to feel uncomfortable. Maybe the medication was starting to kick in, or maybe...

There was something not quite normal about the way this squirrel sat so still. One of the reasons she had always enjoyed a good squirrel chase was because of the way they never, ever seemed to stop moving. Always, they jittered and twitched, their eyes never fixing on a single point for more than a few seconds before bouncing on to something else. This squirrel sat still, though. It's eyes never wavered for a second. It's paws didn't knead one another. It didn't chew nervously or even seem to breathe. Its strange tail, like a furry twig with a ball at one end, was perfectly poised, unmoving.

"Sorry, squirrel. I never thought I'd be saying this, but I think I would rather just lay around in the grass until supper. I don't feel like chasing you guys today."

"No. Doggie come with me. Chase. Follow. Take a walk," it said.

When Martha didn't move, it climbed down the fence post and came toward her.

For some reason, Martha wasn't sure she wanted this squirrel to come any closer. The uncomfortable feeling she had increased with every step it took.

"Um..." she said.

"Martha Dog, come with me," it said. "I show you something."

"Um..." she said again, as the hair on her back began to stand up. "I... I cant. I..."

She stood up, and leaned away from it, preparing to flee if it came any closer.

"I show you the magic," it said, and sat back on its hind legs again.

"There's no such thing," Martha said automatically, before feeling suddenly very stupid for blurring such a thing without thinking it through.

"So humans say," said the squirrel, his round little eyes watching her closely. "We beasts know better."

"Um..." said Martha, unable to come up with an intelligible response.

"You coming?" it chittered, before whipping around and skittering back the way it had come, up the fencepost, and out of sight.

The uncomfortable feeling left her, only to be replaced by an even stronger feeling of curiosity. What harm could there be in following it? It was just one little squirrel.

Martha sighed wearily, and padded toward the back gate. It would probably be gone when she got there. The squirrels liked to play tricks, she knew, although these tricks usually involved sitting on one of the lower branches of the acorn tree in the park so they could taunt her and throw nuts at her. Never once had one of them asked her to follow it anywhere.

When she was on the other side of the fence, though, she could see it waiting for her.

"Come, doggie," it said, and hurried away from her before she could formulate the burning question that had lodged itself so suddenly in her mind. "Where are we going?!" she cried, willing her heavy legs to keep pace with it.

It was already around the corner, though. There was nothing to do but follow it and see what it wanted. Maybe...