A Woman’s Best Friends
Lightning has done the impossible; it has struck Gretel Erlich for the second time. She escaped the first incident relatively harm free when it traveled up through her horse’s legs, and out of her body, but she isn’t so lucky now. At least she can rely on prompt and efficient medical service, right? Wrong. It turns out that everybody fails her, including the ambulance drivers, doctors, nurses, and even her newly estranged husband. In fact, only her two dogs will remain by her side in the end.
The first part of this essay does not have any sense of time to it. On the contrary, it seems to be describing how Ms. Erlich is meandering through a sea of timelessness. She is neither here nor there, but slowly she begins trickling back into reality. She says, “There is a terrible feeling of oppression with no oppressor.” She is trying to figure out what is going on; why she has a strange feeling that there is something wrong, but she has no idea. She is almost sure that she is dying. She is relieved that her dogs are coming with her when she says, “My two beloved dogs appear. They flank me like tiny rockets, their fur pressed against my ribs. A leather harness holds us all together. The dogs climb toward light, pulling me upward at a slant from the sea.” Even though in reality it is dark and stormy around her, she is dreaming that she is with her dogs, so all is well. The sun is shining, and she paints a picture of serenity. The next thing the reader knows, after a short recanting of the moments leading up to the strike, she wakes up in a pool of blood, crumpled like an unused marionette off to the side of the trail she’d been hiking on. We are shocked back into reality just as she surely must have been. Of course, the first thought to cross her mind, other than wondering what has happened to her, is where her dogs are, and if they’re alive.
