Loyal

They gave him an overdose of anesthetic, and its fog shut down his heart in seconds. I tried to hold him, but he was somewhere else. For so much of love one of the principals is missing, it's no wonder we confuse love with longing. Oh I was thick with both. I wanted my dog to live forever and while I was working on impossibilities I wanted to live forever, too. I wanted company and to be alone. I wanted to know how they trash a stiff ninety-five-pound dog and I paid them to do it and not tell me. What else? I wanted a letter of apology delivered by decrepit hand, by someone shattered for each time I'd had to eat pure pain. I wanted to weep, not "like a baby," in gulps and breath-stretching howls, but steadily, like an adult, according to the fiction that there is work to be done, and almost inconsolably.

—William Matthews