My nose is stuffy, and my paws are damaged. Yet hope drives me to continue digging. Hope drives me to listen, gives me something to ground myself on. Hope keeps me working, hope keeps me quiet. Hope gets me treats; hope keeps me obedient. Hope lets me listen and believe. Believe in the proprietors’ claims — the hope in their factuality.
Soon, I will be adopted. It will be a loving couple, suited perfectly for me. I’ve grown not to enjoy much company. After all, I’m conditioned only for my occupation. My desire for adoption alone is something I believe to be unnatural. Personal desire, to me, isn’t something I should be experiencing. But I find it to be understandable how I have developed this peculiar want.
After all, all I’ve known since a mature age has been a promise for what is supposedly my dream. I would be adopted, cared for, played with, and loved. This is described to me as the ultimate utopia, all I should ever want. And all of this is only in return for just a simple occupation. I am to find truffles — use the nose gifted to my kind with talent in scent association, dig through the dirt with my determined paws, and let the proprietors consult my harvest by the end of the day.
I am Beatrix, a Lagotto Romagnolo dog, and I forever hope — hope for freedom to flee into my own path. And I know I am close to it. There have been no implications to confirm this knowledge, but similar to my skill in scent association, I know I can sense it.
And right now, the dirt I am digging through, despite my hurting paws, gives me an essence of something new, yet familiar. It couldn’t be a truffle; it has a vastly different scent. It radiates a sense of ending, or maybe beginning. All I’m sure of at the moment is my mind’s need to retrieve it. I start to realise my heart rate has started rising rapidly as I tried to put this strange feeling into words. It’s a feeling of hard rain pouring onto you, so hard that it almost hurts, but instead of liquid, or anything physical, the rain is hope. I continue digging with my aching paws because I hope. I hope that this feeling I sense will be worthwhile, and that I have reason to sense it.
The feeling only intensifies as I feel myself getting closer and closer. My hole so far is about a metre and a half deep, and I come to a halt as the feeling intensifies so hard, I feel a tangle of it branch out of my heart and encapsulate my whole body. I slow down, and continue digging more carefully, because another feeling in me tells me I might damage the treasure. And just as I begin implementing this change into my digging, my paw touches the object, and it feels as if my body is in a realm connected to the treasure, and it only.
It is a damaged daffodil plant. Bright yellow like the sun, but what it radiated was much stronger than the massive amount of energy and light the bright star could ever produce. The bud looked into me as if it were trying to send me a signal that I couldn’t exactly make out. Its bulb was still connected. I held it with immense care, only by its bulb, making sure not to make the wrong contact with it, as it felt like every nerve in my brain was telling me to treat this flower like it was something one of a kind.
I ended my day and brought the proprietor my truffles for the day. And for once, I felt an obligation outside of my occupation. I am Beatrix, the Lagotto Romagnolo dog, and I have never felt a stronger desire than the one I currently feel to plant the daffodil.
Hope made me leave the doghouse, hope that the rain that started pouring down was yet another signal. Hope then made me sprint far away into the trees until my already sore paws felt as though they were stepping on dozens of sharp spikes. I found a small spot where the trees came to a halt, circled by long bushes and more trees, and I began to dig into its centre.
And for the first time in my life, digging didn’t feel monitored and obligated. I dug a small area to plant the flower on my own accord, closed it up around the pedicel because I wanted to, sat and watched the pouring rain sap it with growth because it felt good — it felt good making an aimless decision of my own.
Over the next few days, this progress repeated over and over until I was sure I was slowly losing my skill in sensing truffles. I sensed intense scents from more daffodils, took them into my little area in the woods, and let them grow until the area transformed into a small garden. It didn’t take long for me to get kicked from my occupation and the doghouse, as all my focus on finding truffles reincarnated into my passion for finding and planting more daffodils.
My last day, I ran from the doghouse one final time, feeling petals of hope dig into my paws with every jump. The wind brushing against my fur and drawing it back felt reminiscent of the future — brushing the old strands into a new direction, and only my movements would now determine that direction. Only my own actions and my own desire had the right to determine my path.
I sensed that my life was finally beginning, and continued sprinting harder than ever, knowing that I had the freedom to thread my determined paws toward any direction I wished to. Hope kept me sprinting — hope that I could find my own path. And I know that this hope will never let me down.