I held Kay's Boxer puppy - or her limp, expired shell - in my arms, feeling more than tasting the saliva between my lips, fluid which had transferred there from her dead muzzle as I tried to breathe and massage life into her still-warm body (was it warmth of sunlight, or of her now ebbed life?). I paused for a second to wonder whether I'd think I was a bastard if I'd noticed myself caring, rather than not, about the soiling of my pleated trousers onto which feces had transferred from her now non-governed bowels.
I returned to my hotel directly after leaving the tragic scene of the dead puppy and her owner mourning her in the cluttered yard of her awful, pitiful trailer.
I still wonder, at times (like these last few minutes), what led each of them to that life of theirs. What were Kay's specific reasons for abusing herself with her lifestyle and heavy use of heavy drugs (when she could afford them)? What lay in her past? What lacked her present? Things just are as they are, but each thing is the result of many - and, as a humanimal, I am adept at seeing them as such, as results with somewhat traceable roots. Like the puppy; she asphyxiated on her cheap, plastic-cased braided steel cord tether; life left her form due to a lack of oxygen, due to her being unattended due to my well-intended carting of Kay around for errands in my rental car. There was the revelation of the plight of the trailer, then the grocery shopping, then the shopping for booze, then the refusal of the offer for sex in exchange for the favor, then the ranging about for drugs that were never acquired (or revealed as being the item sought, only rather inferred), and then the return to the hovel and the still little corpse... and the attempt at resuscitation, as though pulling her life back into this world would redeem some as of yet unidentified cause for sadness deep within me.
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