Swamp Cooler

The dog looked like he was smiling when he panted, but we were all worried about his heaving chest. He was old, and the vet said he had a heart murmur. We gave him cool water, but it was Candy who had brought the umbrella and thought to prop it alongside the dog so its pale shade lessened the heat on his fur. When the water and the umbrella weren’t enough, when the dog kept panting with his big mouth opened wide, Peet thought maybe we should make a swamp cooler. He had a towel in his car, and Tea had brought ice for the strawberries. It was a group effort, making the swamp cooler, and I didn’t contribute much but I did bring the dog and that counts for something. 

A different cemetery, some old place with wide canopies and gnarly roots, might have made for a better picnic. This cemetery had a tiny chapel in a field, and sure, there were trees, but only around the edge, and noon shadows are selfish, making no room for human or dog. For a few minutes I walked the dog next to the chapel so he could rest in the patch of shade hugging the walls, and that might have helped, but then some lady showed up and I worried she would get mad at me for having a dog in a cemetery. A Catholic one at that. I don’t know what the Bible says about dogs in cemeteries or if they even thought of that when they wrote it. Vincent’s brother is a Catholic priest and I could have asked him, but he doesn’t like dogs much so I’m sure his answer would have been how dare you. I had made the dog piss as soon as I got out of the car, on the little pull-off beside the road, but the lady didn’t know that I was doing my best to keep the dog from pissing on anyone’s grave. And maybe that’s rude, too, letting a dog piss on the pull-off that’s more or less the cemetery anyway. 

By the time I got back to the picnic, the food was all set up and the towel was frosty and cool. Peet squeezed out most of the water and the dog lay down, panting, and we put the towel over his back. It must have helped some. I had made focaccia, Vincent’s recipe, and I’m sure I didn’t put as much oil on as he did but it was good. Not as good as Vincent making it himself, how on any random afternoon he would say, “I feel like making focaccia.” But his favorite was always the next morning. He would drink his coffee and eat his crunchy focaccia and he always seemed so pleased with himself, that he was the type of person to just make focaccia when he felt like it. That is something I always loved about him, how if there was some little thing to make our lives better, he would just do it. 

Vincent wasn’t pagan but he wasn’t Catholic either and since he was dead I guess his opinion on both of those didn’t matter so much. Candy set up a little altar, and I put some photographs of Vincent on it: Vincent bent over with laughter in the kitchen, Vincent crawling across a log in a swamp, Vincent on the couch with two dogs licking his face. There was a part of the ritual where Candy lit candles and we could say whatever we wanted and he might hear us. In the moment I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, so I said that I had adopted his dog and the dog was doing pretty good. Sleeping on the bed and wallowing in ponds and everything. I like to think it mattered to have his dog there. That he would have been happy to know we brought his dog to see him on his birthday and that all of us tried to keep the dog cool and did an okay job of it. Maybe we should have waited till evening for the picnic, and maybe Vincent should have waited to shoot up till he had a buddy to keep an eye on him. We’re all doing our best out here with what we got, with ice water and an umbrella and a towel, trying to find the parts of us that hurt the most and throwing little parties over them. 

Blake HC Mihm is an emerging writer who lives in southwestern Virginia with his two dogs. His work has been featured in Lilac Peril, Ouch! Collective, and Dishsoap Quarterly, and is upcoming in West Trade Review. He was selected as one of the poets for DC Pride Poems 2024. You can read more of his writing at blakehc.wordpress.com. 

This essay is a Short Reads original.