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Getting Lost

An Appalachian Trail marker, a noodle shop, a white suit and matching fedora

The Cancerous Dog

Janet The Cow

They’re all gone now, but when I was a kid, there were cows all around my house, even though we were only twelve miles from downtown. Half the kids I went to school with, their parents owned cows. Even my own parents, a dozen cows, penned in the field across the street, behind my dad’s saloon. Big brown cows with white faces and large, sad eyes — and long eyelashes, longer even than the ones my mom kept in her top dresser drawer.

Fritz: A Fable

Fritz, a gray, wolflike German shepherd, howled so terribly at some intruder that his owner, Igor Lovrak, went into his larder and greased his great-grandfather’s rifle and thumbed gunpowder and bullets into the barrel before he dared walk out into the yard.

Green-Eyed Dog

I am nineteen, a pale pimply suburbanite so thin my knees and elbows knife through my clothes. I have learned almost everything I know from television and Time magazine. I was once afraid of the world, worldophobic, but down here if you show your fear you will be eaten alive.

Early

My father called two weeks ago and told me that my dog’s health was declining. Ringo has been blind for more than a year and generally sits on the porch smelling the world pass by, oblivious to the flies that dance across his useless eyes.

Bleeding Dharma

She comes in at 4:30 and spends half an hour in the bathroom without speaking to you, and you know why she is washing. She walks upstairs to the bedroom and announces that she has found someone else, she has just spent the night with him, and she is moving out. She blames you.

Time

Moving Out

Pencils, three hundred dollars, slashed tires

Burying O’Ryan

I brought my shovels to the grave site and marked out a larger area. O’Ryan was a big dog, and I knew that a hole always gets smaller as you dig down.