RICKY’S PASSING

We all need someone close, and when they die..

Daisy Penury knew the end was near when Ricky died.

She had known Ricky all of his life. She had nurtured him when he was unwell, she had stroked his head when he couldn’t sleep, she had fed him as well as she could, and here he was, resting that ultimate final sleep on the fluffy rug in front of her fireplace. Not that it was a warm fireplace because it was home to no fire even though it had been a cool June and she was wearing three layers of thick clothes in order to neutralize the cold that sneaked under the living room door.

“Living room I don’t think!” she muttered to herself, but Ricky was motionless and cold. Ricky was dead.

“Dying room,” she breathed.

For most of his life Ricky had been her only friend and when she looked back on the years they’d spent together, the two of them, a tear slipped like the tiniest of waterfalls from her left eye.

She’d never seen Ricky cry. That had been his strength.

“If only you’d told me, somehow, that you were feeling ill,” she murmured to him, but, being dead, there was no comforting reply from him as he lay motionless and lifeless.

In the end and because she couldn’t stand the presence of death any longer, she wearily made her way into the back garden, and using the spade she used when planting potatoes, dug a hole in the centre of the small lawn where she had hoped to be sitting in her deckchair and soaking up the sun when it finally decided to warm her up.

“It’ll be cold down there, Ricky, but not so cold as I feel in my heart right now,” she whispered.

She knew that if he could have done, he would have told her that it was all right. That his passing might have been a cold one due to the weather in the world outside and the high cost of warmth. And she prayed that otherwise he was comfortable.

“I’m saying farewell now then, Ricky,” she wept, and carefully she lowered the cold body of her only friend these many years into the hole she had dug, and smoothed it over with so much care it seemed to take an age.

Then, the task over, she turned to go back into the house.

“I’ll be following you soon enough, old friend,” she sighed, “I always promised...”.

Which was perfectly true. Her time had come. She couldn’t bear to live for even a minute without the comfort of Ricky.

It was a policeman who found her. There had been a local smell that could only be a rotting body, one confirmed by the presence of large black flies that buzzed against the cold window, looking for a way out.

She was sitting at her small round dining table, head slumped, the stink of death rising from her. A dried up tear clung to the desiccated skin of a face that had seen too much sorrow.

In front of her was an empty bottle that had once contained a hundred pills, an empty china teacup and a letter.

“It says she’s leaving all her earthly goods to a bloke called Ricky,” the policeman said to her neighbour who, out of curiosity and a need to make sure the localized stink would soon be neutralised, had stuck her nose in. “Do you know anything about this Ricky?”

“He died. I saw her when she dug a grave for him, in the garden, under her lawn,” replied her neighbour sadly, “Ricky was her cat…”

© Peter Rogerson, 08.06.22

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