Skipper — The Lantern
An empty leash, one lantern, and four hours of calling his name. The power was out all over the harbour that night, and the fog had taken everything else.
Skipper had slipped the yard when the transformer blew, out into a night with no edges to it. So Marge walked the shore path, the way she had walked it for forty years, lantern high, calling him the way you call somebody you have fed every day of his life.
Then the fog went very quiet. A bark. Once. Far off, where the black rocks run out into the water. The lantern swung in her hand, and Marge went toward that sound the way you go toward a voice in church.
His prints were in the wet sand at the rocks’ edge, filling with water even as she watched. Then her light fell on empty rock, and nothing else. Only the tide, coming in.
So she knelt, and set the lantern down, and called him once more, the way she had called him as a pup. Two eyes caught the light. Then he was inside her coat, shaking hard, and so, she found, was she.
They walked home through the fog together, two shapes inside one small circle of light. The leash stayed in her pocket the whole way home. He was not going anywhere.