Maurice moaned and shifted on his pillow. Mornings were monsters--writhing and frightening--mornings were always awful. He'd been going somewhere. The dog was with him and that was wrong. The dog wasn't even on a leash. Sure enough, right out of the car, the dog saw something and took off running. You can shout "Come!" from here to Kingdom Come and that dumb dog . . . the dog's so stupid it has only a one-word vocabulary, it only has to keep the one word in its little mind yet one distraction and it forgets. The one word come has come and gone. In the one ear and . . . maybe wax plugs would work, keep the one word captive, rattling around a pea in its pea-brain for recall whenever called. The dog is chasing a squirrel towards a tree. Dumb dog--come!--squirrel always wins that race. But then the dog was the squirrel, chasing towards a nut fallen from the tree. That made no sense! It made so little sense that the dog was back in the picture, rebounding from the tree out into the middle of a busy street. The dog bounding around the lanes wearing its stupid happy dog-smile face. Dogs don't know about cars--dogs learn about cars the hard way. It's a lesson that usually doesn't get to last but a few excruciating minutes. Where's the Darwin in any of that? The entire scenario was so obscenely surreal. Maurice had never even owned a goddamn dog. It was that injustice which woke him up, before the fucking dog could get itself killed.

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