A Perfect Day

“It’s a perfect day,” the husband proclaims, “for hiking with the dogs.”

He’s standing by the window, his forehead pressed against the hard glass. He turns, his face darkened by the dim interior light. “Old Cocoa’s getting a belly,” he says, but looks at his wife’s.

His wife, sitting on the couch reading and eating cookies, fingers new gray in her hair. She finishes the page she is reading. Cocoa, asleep at the wife’s feet, snores, whiskers trembling. She is ten now, and round, her body like buttery fudge, the perfect pillow.

“Get your jacket.” The husband leaves the room after he says this, leaving the wife unsure for a moment whether or not she gave voice to dissent. She glances out the window; she likes snow, but only when viewed from inside. She hates hiking in winter.

She could tell him this, though he already knows. She could tell him, but would then be subjected to a lecture on how she's out of shape, how she needs to get outside, how she needs to listen to him. Always listen to him.

After parking the car in a patch of dirty slush, the husband penetrates the forest, Cinder, his dog, weaving through his legs.

The wife climbs from his car and sighs at her shadow, flat and blue, dulling the snow on the ground. She coaxes out Cocoa and locks the doors. Cocoa and the wife wade in the husband’s path, winding past trees glistening with ice.

Cinder, the husband’s shiny black Labrador, still athletic, leaps ahead, snow flying like sparks from his wet hide. Cocoa, the chocolate Lab, old as Cinder but round now, balances, cautious, on a fragile crust of ice covering deeper snow. Breaking the crust, Cocoa crashes through.

“Too fast!” the wife calls to her husband, her words distorted by wind. “Cocoa can’t keep up.”

The wife pauses to extract her boot from beneath hidden roots; she finds it is trapped. Wincing, ankle twisting, she shakes free and swears.

“I’ve got to watch that Cinder doesn’t take off,” the husband shouts back, not slowed by the thigh-high mounds through which he steadily plows.

Cocoa flattens her ears and pants, steam clouding her yellow-toothed mouth. The dog stumbles, knees buckling; her ice-crusted stomach plunges into drifts. She whimpers and holds out a paw ringed white with aged fur. The wife pries from the reddened pads slivers of cold rock.

The husband ascends a slick, tree-covered hill. Cinder sprints to the top, hurtles down, gallops skyward again. Cocoa and the wife limp and heave to the base, and look up.

Cocoa tries. Her paws slip off stone, sink. The wife presses herself into the dog’s haunches. She discards her gloves and grasps brittle branches, her fingers purpled and numb. She wedges herself, wrapping her arms around tree trunks, until she feels secure. “Use my feet,” she says. Leaning against rough bark, she becomes a dog ladder. Sweat freezes on her face. Cocoa sniffs the arctic air and places her paw gingerly on the wife’s foot.

Both of them jump at the crash: Cinder, sliding, as if on a sled, barks greetings to them mid-flight. He cruises past. Moments later, from the top, he slides, airborne again. The husband whistles.

The wife repeats a pattern as she moves up the slope—crawl, grasp, wedge. Each time the wife digs her hips into a tree, Cocoa uses her boots for leverage. Cocoa’s paws claw at the stiff leather, fighting for a grip. Bit by bit, woman and dog climb the hill, as ice-crystals form in the corners of their eyes. The husband, frolicking with Cinder far away at the top, gives no sign of notice. The wife knows what he expects: she must catch up, no matter how; she has no other option.