This work was published in The Avenue Journal, Issue X: Dogs
Holy Retrievers
by EJ Hyndman
Dogs are really cool. It’s often said that God thought so too, because He made so damn many breeds of them.
In Sunday School, I was told that retrievers hold the secrets to the universe. My mother swears I remember this wrong, but I swear I don’t. I was nine years old, and Miss O’Donoghue was wearing a baby-pink cardigan with embroidered yellow flowers around the cuffs. I asked her why there were things. She asked me what I meant.
I said I meant the floor, the ceiling: Why were there chairs, tables, cardigans with yellow flowers around the cuffs, me, you—I looked out the window, saw a golden retriever bounding along on his walk—retrievers. “Why are there retrievers?”
Miss O’Donoghue laughed because I suppose she thought I was cute and what I was asking was not profound. She said, “Retrievers are God and God is a retriever. Everything, even the tiniest strand of golden fur, is part of His creation. Everything holds within it the secrets of the universe.”
I enjoyed her answer. I enjoyed the way it sounded and the way it made me feel. I enjoyed the comforting nothingness of it, the rhythm, and how sure of herself she sounded. I even enjoyed that I didn’t understand it, because it made me feel that perhaps one day, I would, and if I never did, it was because I wasn’t meant to, because my brain was too small for such a complicated question as why there are things, and that I was held by someone who did understand, so could relinquish any responsibility in questioning at all.
Another kid—Robert—shut the blinds, bleaching the room in gray. Ever since, I can’t look at a retriever without hearing her words. Retrievers are God and God is a retriever. And within them holds the secrets of the universe.
EJ Hyndman is a writer and veil poi artist from the UK. After a decade confined by chronic illness, she’s now in recovery, exploring the world and writing flash fiction shaped by resilience and invisibility. She loves circus arts, movement and storytelling in all its forms. Her work can be found in FLARE magazine and The Orange Rose.
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