The Apricot Trail

Beatrix found Luke in darkness. Not the darkness of a room with the lights off but the darkness of a man who had chosen it — who had sat long enough in the unlit bedroom with a dead dog in his arms that the absence of light had become part of the arrangement, a condition he had accepted rather than a problem he intended to solve. Duke lay across his lap, stiff and cold and held with the careful tenderness reserved for things that can no longer feel tenderness but whose owner refuses to act as though that matters. Luke's fingers moved through the fur behind Duke's ear in repetitions that had outlasted their purpose and become their own kind of prayer.

The light switch ended it. Beatrix flicked it because someone had to, and the sixty watts that followed did what light always does to grief conducted in private — it made the scale of it visible. Red eyes. Blotched skin. A man folded inward around a body that no longer pushed back against the hold. The room smelled of blood and fur and the particular staleness that accumulates when someone has been sitting in one position long enough to forget they have a body of their own.

Luke confessed guilt the way people confess things they have already convicted themselves of — not seeking absolution but confirming the sentence. He could have done more. He had let Duke down. Beatrix sat beside him and offered the only rebuttal available: he had done everything he could, Duke had known he was loved, and the dog had been fortunate in his family. The words were small. They were also true. And Luke received them the way parched ground receives rain — without visible change, but with absorption that went deeper than the surface suggested.

Clivilius would not accept a burial. Beatrix delivered Charity's warning with the reluctance of someone passing along information whose necessity did not reduce its cruelty: a body interred in unprotected ground would attract predators worse than shadow panthers, and the settlement possessed no walls capable of defending a grave. The dimension that had killed Duke would not even permit him the dignity of resting in its soil. Luke absorbed this in silence — a nod, a tightened jaw, a decision forming behind eyes too swollen to read clearly. He stood. He gathered Duke. He walked outside.

The apricot tree had been in the garden when Luke moved in, already established, already bearing fruit whose fallen remnants Duke had discovered before anyone else in the household. Over-ripe apricots, soft and sweet, scattered across the grass each autumn — and Duke had used them to solve a problem no human had managed. Henri, his brother, had refused the concrete steps between the deck and the garden for weeks. Fear or laziness or some private canine arithmetic that classified the descent as not worth the risk. Duke carried apricots up to the deck, dropped them at Henri's feet, then laid a trail of fruit down the steps and into the grass. Henri followed. Stomach first. Everything else second. The memory belonged to a version of this garden that no longer existed, but the tree remained — bare-branched in winter, skeletal against the night sky, holding the shape of seasons Duke would not see.

Beatrix transited to Clivilius and returned with a shovel. The round trip took minutes. The act of fetching a digging tool from another dimension to bury a dog in a suburban backyard occupied a category of experience that neither of them paused to classify, because classification required energy they were spending on something more immediate: breaking ground beneath a tree whose roots resisted the blade and whose soil had been compacted by years of dogs running circles through fallen fruit.

They dug without speaking. Metal struck stone. Earth crumbled. Breath clouded in the winter air. The rhythm was harsh and repetitive and served the same function that all physical labour serves in the presence of grief — it gave the body something to do while the mind processed what the body could not prevent. When the hole was deep enough, Luke lifted Duke for the last time and placed him in the ground with a care that made the act look less like burial and more like putting a child to bed.

Filling the grave was worse than digging it. Each shovelful of earth covered more of what remained visible — fur, then sheet, then shape, then nothing. By the time the mound was smooth, Duke had disappeared entirely, and the finality struck Luke with enough force to bring him to the base of the tree. His composure did not crack. It detonated. Sobs tore through him — raw, graceless, the sounds of a man who had been holding himself together across two dimensions and twenty-four hours and who had reached the place where holding was no longer structurally possible.

Beatrix sat beside him. She did not speak until the worst of it had passed, because some grief needs to be loud before it can be quiet, and interrupting it with comfort would have been a kindness that functioned as interference. When Luke finally lifted his head — face devastated, eyes fixed on the disturbed earth — his words had moved beyond Duke and into the territory that had been waiting behind the grief all day. No resources. No money. No security. The settlement exposed, under-equipped, dependent on a supply chain that consisted of one woman with a Portal Key shuttling camping supplies through a hole in reality. Could Bixbus survive? Did they have any right to believe it could?

The question was not rhetorical. It was the sound of a man reaching the bottom of what he could carry alone and discovering that the bottom had no floor.

Beatrix tightened her arm around his shoulders. Something had shifted in her during the silence — not an answer, not yet, but the shape of one. A direction that had been assembling itself across the day's disasters, through the pet shop basement and the supply runs and the caravan commission and the confrontation with her mother, and that now pressed forward with enough force to override the grief that had been governing every decision since dawn.