My mother called me out. Not that I remember any of this clearly, but I remember that. My dog… She had been a friend to me. My first true friend, as a kid who kept to himself, who read too much. Aside from my mother, that dog was the only other creature I felt loved me, and I loved her back in my childish ways. How old might I have been, oh… eight, maybe. Or around there. Maybe a year younger. Old enough to have been around school for a while and known that no friendship came out of people for me, the outsider, the strange kid. But that damn dog… If I believed in such things I’d say she was an angel sent to help me through that dark start of my life.

And she had been sick. Listless. Not wanting to eat. Being far from most places the local vet was many hours away at best, but the phone consultation had revealed it could be bad news. He would be over in a day or so, he said, and I’m sure we got instructions on how to care for her in the meanwhile but I do not remember those details.

And then my mother called me out, to the barn. I don’t know who found the dog, I don’t know how they knew, but they knew. As did I, I guess, when I saw her. I held her. They fetched us a big beanbag to lounge on as I held her. No talk about the barn being a dirty place for inside furniture… no that bean bag would have to be burned afterwards anyways. I remember the blood. The bloody vomit as she convulsed in my arms. I remember her licking my hand as to calm me because I was crying. I don’t remember if it was minutes, or if it was hours.

But I remember that it stopped.

Perhaps this was not the worst day of my life... but it was the first of the worst. It may not be remembered well, but it will never be forgotten.