Eleni's Dog

I passed Eleni's dog today - the stray she loves - as I was walking to the street with the minaret. It was foraging in a half moon of turf land that accidentally carries sounds like an amphitheatre and always needs its grass cut. The dog looked busy enough, with its small head perched on a big barrel body and a kind of permanent grin on its face; familiar looking wiry biscuit-coloured fur; short legs to trot around the harbour with, unkempt nails tapping on the paving. A mutt's life, that black gummy grin still hanging in the air after the dog has gone. Tourists stood nearby taking photographs of the decrepit houses crumbling above us under the sun.

I looked at the dog and remembered how Eleni had been telling me one evening about it. We were sitting on the harbour with our backs to the people and watching night creep up at us from the sea, watching as the world beneath the water's surface disappeared and the waves transformed themselves into brooding slow-moving beasts, blackening. Eleni told me about how the dog would come and sit beside her to share the view and she made the sound of the dog's sigh. And with a jolt, just like that, the two were one!