Sammy’s left eye is milky white. Sometimes you can see the outline of a pupil, wandering toward the side. Getting stuck.
The other eye is a deep brown. It follows me wherever I go. To the kitchen for a beer. To the cookie jar for a treat. Down the hallway late at night, past her worn-out bed by the bathroom, into the empty bedroom.
Her tail thumps as I kneel down now on the hard tile of the exam room floor. I kiss her dry nose, press our foreheads together. Her body jerks twice, a pool of urine spreading out behind her. She whines and the sharp burn in my chest shoots up into my throat.
“Shh,” I whisper and smell my own sour breath mixing with hers. She whines again.
“Looks like we’re all set here, Mr. Black,” says the vet, rifling through the forms on her clipboard.
I want to grab the woman’s tight bun and jerk, hard. Instead I kiss Sammy’s nose again. Scratch behind her velvet ears. She pants and I slowly lay her head down on the blanket.
“Do it.”
The vet nods and clips the first syringe into the catheter in Sammy’s front left paw.
“Wait,” I say, and sit down fast, shoving my knuckles into my eyes and breathing hard. Big, deep breaths like Mary used to take when she did yoga. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In to the count of 3, then slowly out 6.
Mary picked Sammy out of a cardboard box of wriggling pups. Right on the side of the highway. Held her up to me and whispered, “Daddy’s girl.”
“Mr. Black?” the vet asks, touching my shoulder, and I snap.
The vet shoves the door open, her bun lopsided now, and runs out. I push myself up. Lean over Sammy and reattach the syringe she dropped.
“Here you go.” I push the plunger, then pick up the second vial, the fluid a bright pink color. Like the bubble gum medicine our daughter used to take for her ear infections. I wonder if her medicine still looks like this, still smells like Big League Chew.
She’d be taking pills by now, though, wouldn’t she?
I clip the new syringe in, then reach down and gently pinch the webbing between Sammy’s toes. She is already asleep, her one brown eye staring, unblinking, toward the door. Is she dreaming of walking in the park? That time I took her in Joe’s convertible and drove around the neighborhood, the girls on the corner coming over to pet her? Cooing and acting like I wasn’t a piece of shit since I had such a good dog?
I try to push the second plunger but my fingers freeze. Mary was right, of course. I can’t ever finish what I start.
“Daddy’s girl,” I say. And it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.
Header photograph © Eon Alden.
Hannah Grieco is a writer and advocate in Arlington, VA. Find her at www.hgrieco.com, on Twitter at @writesloud, at Barrelhouse Magazine as an assistant fiction editor, and at Longleaf Review as a nonfiction reader.