My hand swells and seizes the dog. I march out of my apartment, down the stairs, and release him outside. The dog looks up at me and grins and grins and grins. His stub of a tail makes his rear vibrate like an insect. Go! I shout. He whimpers, as if confused. I turn around and walk back into the building. When I glance out the window the dog is still standing there, still wagging. Grinning. I think, but I can’t move my body, not even my mouth to speak. I will not accept this burning of my flesh. I force my right foot to move towards the elevator. The dog barks at me through wood and glass. I weep with abandon.

Elba is sobbing when I open the door. I’ve seen her cry before but never like this and I all but drop the hat I’m holding, a cranberry piece with crumpled tissue flowers. I want to move aside the lights but she’s too distressed, and the brightness of the living room is shocking and almost painful. It throws itself onto her face, her skin so bright it seems to have fallen off, leaving me staring into a smeared architecture of wet bones.

A great feeling of foreboding settles into my stomach, pulling it down towards my knees in fear and anxiety. I ask her what’s wrong and the moment she opens her mouth again she is crying, great animal cries, says a bum on Elm had run up to her in great excitement, thrusting a photograph at her and when her eyebrows knitted together  the bum began to cry and said a man had loaned him the book and he’d known it was his book because of the man’s picture and this man was the bum living down on Second and Main and so he’d gone over there and found him twitching, curled up with blood coming out from his eyes and screeching about his liver, and the bum from Elm Street hadn’t known what to do but then he remembered the picture in the book and showed it to the dying man and he said, that was my wife, that was my wife, and Elba gives a great shudder and wails and I cannot accept the vomit rising in my throat, cannot accept the skeletal whiteness of her face and I stand and the contagion in my hand flames and hatches like a thousand spiders running over my skin.