Lucky Penny - a haibun

Melanie Alberts

December 8, 2021

It was a late afternoon in June when our hound Penny went missing. She wasn’t missing for long—shortly after I heard mockingbirds making calls of pain over her favorite resting place on our porch, I found her around the corner by the side of the road. Someone had draped a sheet over her body. Her head was lolled back, her leg bone exposed, and I couldn’t keep my composure. As I sobbed, two women stopped their cars to help me, one even sent her husband to load the body in his truck and take it back to our house. 

lost dog—

a low whining

inside me

I had to pick up our son at the karate dojo and phoned my husband on the way there as he was out of town, but there was no answer. Crying, somehow I made it to the dojo. It had been a blustery day; the wind blew down the gate we used to secure Penny on our porch and that is how she got loose. As I opened the car door, a gust carried a document out of the door pocket and I lunged to get it. Seeing me reaching for the ground, one of the other karate kid’s moms called out, “Find a lucky penny?” Crying harder, I explained how our Penny just died. Oh no, she said. I saw her lying there as I drove home earlier. I’m sorry.

a fever passes

unexpectedly

between us

When I reached my husband, he insisted that Penny had been lucky. She was a rescue pup, a shepherd-hound mix, and lived the first few months of her life wild before coming to us, adorable but worm-ridden. She was jittery during thunderstorms and cowered around men for certain secret reasons. Penny spoke with us constantly with her powerfully wagging tail and growly vocalizations, her expressive face and curious energy. We called her Penny because of the large, copper circles on her hide, and over the four years she lived with us, we often commented on how strong she was, how fast, how healthy, how exuberant. We were the lucky ones to know and love such an animal, full of wonder and poised to chase after anything that caught her eye, carried off by a sudden breeze.

under the sheet

her unbuckled collar—

the longest day

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in the Ransom Center Magazine, Just This, The Austin Chronicle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Wisteria: A Journal of Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka, and other journals.