Amber watched the sun go down. Soon it would be time for dinner and then a walk with her mistress.
Amber and her mistress had been together for 12 years, just the two of them. The dog that lived across the street had told her about the man who lived with her mistress before Amber came. She found it hard to believe. In all her 12 years, Amber had never seen another man in the house. And why would there be one, her mistress had her for company. Not like the lady who owned that pet across the street. She could not even step out of the house without her husband accompanying her.
Amber liked to think she was the one and only person who could make her mistress happy. And happy she was. Always smiling, always cheerful. Amber had never seen her get angry or yell at anyone. And she was brave and strong too. Amber idolized her and thought the world of her.
There was just one thing she would never understand. Why did her mistress never go out after dark? Her mistress would go out to work early in the morning, but always return home by evening. The only time she would go out of the house after dark was to take Amber for her night-stroll.
Amber wondered if it was because of the boys who lived across the street, the ones who would whistle at her each time her mistress stepped out. Or whether it was because she wore clothes that were different from all the other ladies she saw around her house, the ones who chided her mistress whenever she crossed them in the street (Oh, why couldn’t human beings mind their own business!). Or whether it was because her mistress felt unsafe on the deserted roads after it was dark. She knew it, she could sense it. If only human beings were not so cruel to each other. Whenever she sensed that fear, Amber would draw closer to her mistress, and put her paw on her foot, silently telling her to be unafraid.
If only her mistress could say the same to herself….
(Image credit: Siavash Ghazvinian under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)