To say I’m mildly kissed by paranoia is to say that the Empire State Building is a duplex or that the Boston Marathon is a lovely stroll.  So, when I asked Bobbi to “pretend” to give me the vaccine, breaking 17 kinds of Federal law, she wasn’t surprised.  I didn’t ask her so much as sit down, wait for her to swab my arm with alcohol and just before the stab, catch her green eyes with mine.  She just knew.

Back in high school, we’d tried dating.  It seemed a good idea at the time, she being the prettiest and most popular girl in 10th grade and me being the quietest loner of the sophomore class.  Thing is, we’d grown up wandering the wilds, brambles, marshlands, and woods between our farms.  My Mom said we were like peas and carrots.  I thought we were like peanut butter and jelly.

Our families were timeworn allies, they were in cahoots.  Mine distilled the whitest of lightning; her’s stored and sold it.   The word got around that her great grandpa had the still.  Heck, her great grandparents started the rumor.  You know, they made it obvious where the obvious was to be found, and they let the truth, the reality slide into invisibility. With all the booze they sold up and down the coast, everyone believed it.  When the feds appeared and turned their farm upside down, they found a couple dozen cases of hooch hidden in a cellar at the end of a short tunnel.  They never found the still.

Not only did our families bury our warehouse and their storeroom deception, but they buried a phone line between the two hidden cellars.  Almost 5 miles separated the farms, and that five-mile line never broke or caused any trouble but for a bit of static whenever it rained. There were nights that Bobbi and I would slip down into the tunnels and talk to each other for hours.  I told ghost stories, and she pretended to be scared. We had our own private network, and nobody knew.  

Every summer was bliss. Our vivid imaginations and her two dogs, one yellow and one black, would wander through the woods and marshes.  They were magnificent beasts, fast as the wind and smart.  I was jealous to my core of her; my folks wouldn’t hear of a dog on our farm.  I never did understand them. What’s a farm without a dog?

We laughed as we tore the slimy skunk cabbage and wrinkled our noses.  The dog’s tails never stopped thwapping the reeds as submerged faces explored the muck. They’d dig in the marsh water, pulling up such rare finds as a muck-covered rock or a waterlogged stick.  Whenever there was a find, their faces would suddenly reappear as they’d shake the water from their dripping muzzle.  And, just like that, drop the precious discovery back into the mud.  Nose-dive! Dig!  Dig!  Over and over again, they were untiring muck machines. Once, deep in the Great Swamp, her yellow dog pulled up a metal box. 

He brought it over to us, his face covered in slime and mud, and with a grand ceremony, dropped it in the shallows.

“That was not a stick.”  I had a keen sense of the obvious.

She, the girl of action, plunged into the swamp and found the box before I had the nerve to get my shoes off.

She was wide-eyed, panting; I was wondering what a box was doing in the middle of nowhere.  Her dogs weren’t interested at all.   They were back splashing around and barking at imaginary squirrels.

Inside the box was a rusted skeleton key.  

“Treasure!” she whispered. Our eyes met, and she jumped to her feet and sprinted back towards her farm shouting, “See you tomorrow!  Boys! Here!”  They leaped past me to chase the will-o’-the-wisp from bog to porch.

The next day she gave me a length of leather cord with a much-less-muddy skeleton key dangling on it. “That looks so cool on you!” she cooed when I put it on.  The key settled against my heart. 

Middle school arrived and the days of exploring our woods, the days of ghosts that haunted the ancient cemetery, deadly swamp monsters, treasure boxes, trees with skeleton hands and hours of phone calls ended.  We never did find the treasure for the key.

We dated just once.  Awkward doesn’t begin to say how weird that night was.  Saying “goodbye” at the end of the evening was the last thing we said to each other in High School.   

She wrote to me while I was deployed: “Dear Jim, I’m so sorry.  Your folks were like my own parents.  We’re all devastated. I’m so sorry for your loss.  Love, Bobbi”

When it came to trust? She was the only person left to me. And that key? I’d had to replace the leather numerous times, but it still hung over my heart.  Which, in many ways, Bobbi owned right up until the moment that another lady wandered out of the forest and into my house.

---

There is a monster called loneliness. I had no idea I was its captive until the day she walked into my life. Yes, I knew I was a loner.  I was alone.  Enough said.  But loneliness is something completely different.  It is a terrible beast, a vile enemy, and I thought I could defeat any giant. 

But you can’t defeat what you don’t see. 

Bobbi was the only person I told about Gloria. Bobbi wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. Nobody knew but us two. When Bobbi lost Chester, we knew that Gloria was the last of them in town. We didn’t realize, how could we, that she was not just the last in our town but the last in the state. We thought maybe, maybe this was the case.  

But how would we know? 

The reports, front-page news just a few years before, were long, long gone.  What makes front-page news now?  Whatever doesn’t remind us of them.  News has become all about distraction as if another splashy story featuring the trendiest cocktail would numb the wonder and pain of our global loss. 

The thing is, people, the way we are, we crave what is lost more than what’s around.

That Gloria was the last one, we didn’t know. What did we know?  Had she been discovered, our world would be torn apart by the choppers, news crews, scientists, and soldiers swooping in low on the horizon with net and leash and rope.  Crowds would glue themselves to their flat-screens and dissect us.   Media influencers would transmit her beautiful face (undoubtedly terrified and confused) to a world, wishing it’d won, but instead had lost.  

That didn’t happen. Not on my watch.  On my watch, she grew from the fearful youngster into the mature lady of the house. 

My paranoia had found its purpose.  I hid Gloria from family and friends. From neighbors. From all the slow-flying planes and their cameras. From the satellites and their sweeping eyes and damned AI.  From everything I could imagine would find her out. Because if they’d found her out, they’d tear her away from me in a desperate attempt to save.  They can’t save.  People can’t even save themselves.  Science can’t save the heart.  To be fair, science had its hands full.  

On occasion, Bobbi and I would talk on our secret phone. We’d come to suspect that Gloria was the only dog in the country. For all I know, she was the only dog around north, south, east, or west.  We wondered why Gloria and Chester and others had survived. 

There was no making heads or tails of it. I’d never gotten sick and didn’t get vaccinated.  Bobbi had been “sick like Nick” and had received the vaccine.  As had her brother and parents.  What we did know was that every surviving dog that had been found out and brought in for study died.  Bobbi would read me some of the online arguments, conjectures, and speculations. It all made very little sense.  In the end, there was me and Gloria and a phone line to Bobbi.

Bobbi only came by to visit twice in all the years since she lost her own Chester to “scientific hope.” Once was on a Christmas Eve in the worst blizzard since ’78.  She came stumbling in, having walked, snowshoed, the 5.2 miles from her family’s farm to mine.  She said, “I was in the neighborhood,” we laughed. She was shaking like a junkie in need of a fix.  This kind of snowstorm was likely the only time it’d have been safe for Bobbi’s visit.  She knew all about AI.  Smart woman.

Gloria was an elegant lady.  Though a blond (and she’d let you know that she was very blond) she was very formal.  A pat on the head would bring just one wag, an idiosyncrasy that conveyed her dignity.  When Bobbi walked into the old warehouse space during that storm of storms, she got two.  Two wags for her plus one for me.  I was ecstatic.

“What are we doing, Jim?” she asked that night, Gloria’s head on her lap. “She could be the last hope.”

“I don’t know what, but I know why.”  

“Maybe it’s love.” Love, she supposed.  Simple as that.  

“She may not be the last.” That’s what Bobbi said next.

She’s right about that.  There could be a dozen more of me out there.   There could be a dozen Jim & Glorias.

But she could very well be the last dog. And I kept her for myself.

Why? Because with every fiber of her graceful, fearless being, she was my greatest ally against a most awful enemy:  loneliness, that horrid shadow.  She fought that monstrosity, that dark oblivion, for me as dogs had been fighting for humankind since our fire became their home.

---

The second time Bobbi came around was on a damned hot August afternoon, like the one on which Chester had died. I’d called her on the regular landline, not caring who heard, “She’s not doing well, Bobbi, I think it’s time.”  

Gloria died that blistering August afternoon in the quiet cool of her cavernous home.  No fuss.  15 years. Her golden hair had turned pale, her muzzle frosted with white.  I call that a good run.  She lay there on her favorite bed, her head in my lap, Bobbi’s hand stroking her soft furry belly.  

“You’d have been such a great mom,” Bobbi whispered, and Gloria’s tail thumped.  Not just once or twice.  She thumped her tail to the rhythm of her heartbeat.  When one ended, so did the other.  

As Gloria died, Bobbi and I were merely two friends, maybe even best friends, saying goodbye to our better friend. Saying goodbye to the one thing we loved more than, well, everything. And, Gloria, she died loving us.  How she loved us.  Oh, how she loved us.

The key felt shockingly cold against my chest.  Through the tears, I felt Bobbi take my hand.

---

Finis

Under the Hill