My Misfortune with Dogs

With the heartbreak and hope that our runaway dog, Buddy, would return, my dad refused to receive the puppy my cousin had planned to give to us. Unfortunately for him, the rest of us had fallen in love with the chubbiest and smallest of the huddle.  So in the morning after my cousin’s quinceañera, we took him home with us and named him Buddy as well.  Buddy, the fat chubby furry mop looking puppy, more than anyone else in the household. Everywhere I would go he’d be trailing not far behind. He was with us for about a year until the day my heart was beaten and bruised with scars that would never heal.

 That normal Sunday morning is when tragedy hit. We had been cleaning the house while moving rooms around. I washing dishes, watching into the living room through the pantry, as my parents carried my old wood headboard out of the house. When my baby sister stumbled and pushed the headboard, causing it to come crashing down with a thud on Buddy, who yelped and scurried to the other side of the room. I remember sprinting, trying to see if he was injured, to see him limping across the carpet floor.

 Hearing my parents sobbing, I looked up to their tearful eyes to hear them tell me that he wouldn’t make it. I remember holding him in my arms, not wanting to believe what they said and praying over and over again that he would be alright by some miracle. I watched through a blurry vision as his eyes rolled back then later his head. Clutching him to chest, I felt his breath still and his body to become cold and heavy.         Reluctantly, I refused to let him go, praying for him to come back. After my parents got him out of my arms, I spent all day crying with the memory of my best friend dying in my arms.

It took me a while to get used the empty space on the corner of my bed, which had once been filled with the warmth from his body when he slept, to the painfully silent filled house when  I strolled in from school without his playful barks of excitement.

It would be about four months when my sister wanted another dog. With the death of Buddy on my mind, I had been reluctant to get another one. Bonita is what we called the caramel colored dog when the decision to get her was settled.  I wasn’t as close to her, rather she was more my mom’s than anyone else’s.  Bonita’s death was another accident that shouldn’t have happened. We had just got home from a day out, when we walked in to Bonita, dead on the floor with the electrical wire in her mouth. After her death, my family decided that our household wasn’t safe for dogs and since then the thought of getting another pet has not come into our minds again.