i am not a veterinarian.

It's been two weeks, and sometimes when I look out my kitchen window to the corner across the street where the telephone pole marks the spot, I can still see the dog, lying there limp and resigned to leave its environs without the usual use of its once agile legs.

It was a Saturday night, and I was just about to take a shower before I left for Cambridge to see Marcellus Hall play a show at TT the Bears. I heard a screech of tires on the pavement, a thud, and then desperate, piercing yelps for more than thirty seconds, and they've lasted over a week. I don't know for how much longer I'll hear them, but they were howling with the last bit of fight it had. It may be a while yet.

I ran outside, bare feet and frantic, with my green sweatpants on and an ugly maroon sweater. The dog was lying there panting, and a few cars had lined up along the road. I was scared for the dog, but he wasn't moving set aside the fast rise and fall of his chest, yet I couldn't bring myself to go to him. The girl who was driving the car he had run into was on my side of the street. I asked her if she was o.k., and she said she didn't see it - that she just heard it and stopped. I offered her some water, because I didn't know what else to say. She said no thank you, and I yelled over to whom appeared to be her boyfriend, who had my then begun to pet the dog and tell it to be calm. I said that I didn't know who to call, and he said maybe the police.

I bolted up the stairs to grab the phone, even though he probably had a phone. I just wanted to do something. The police said yes, they would be right there, dear, and thank you for the call. I went back outside. The girl's boyfriend called out the phone number on Rudy's tag; I tried to call the owner, but was connected to voice mail three times and I gave up. I didn't leave a message, because I wouldn't want to get that sort of information in a voicemail. Meantime, the police arrived blue lights, no sirens. The officer walked around and lifted the dog by its upper body to carry it over to the corner.

I cringed when I saw how its lower body and hind legs dangled beneath it without any sign of movement as the officer carried him for about ten feet, for which the time hung suspended. I wondered why the dog didn't whimper or whine, knowing it's spine was twisted and probably at that point severed. To think of it makes me feel nauseated, knowing that its lean, black body became nothing more than a shell in a matter of seconds.

I've never felt even a splinter in any of my bones, but I can feel my own body's fragility when I picture the dog from the inside out, and my stomach turns and my abdomen quivers like my very own spleen is going to rupture at any moment, or maybe my spinal cord will just sever all on its own. I have this feeling a lot lately, and it's overwhelming at best.

It died soon after, right there on the side of the road. I was already upstairs, because after 10 minutes I finally figured out that nothing I could do would make it feel better. That doesn't make me inadequate, or a failure. It just makes me not a veterinarian.

Not then, but later, my eyes filled up like wells, regardless of how far I'd driven to get to where I was going.

I didn't know the dog, but I knew someone had to have loved it, and I could feel that too. And I felt like everyone and everything you love will inevitably get hurt, no matter how big a fence you build around them. And that sometimes when they do, you're not going to be qualified to make them feel better.

I've been quiet lately, or at least my fragile little burned fingers have been. I've been tending without any formal training or expertise a fire that can't be quenched, and though the blisters are healing, the sensation is only slowly returning. But it is.

A side note: as I was writing the first sentence - the first thought outside of email I've been able to complete in nearly three weeks - my mother called. My grandfather had a massive stroke last night and died at five this morning. I hope they have plenty of wood to split wherever he's gone, because at 89 he was still splitting enough wood over the course of a year to heat the house for the the next in its entirety. It's a fairly simple life if you can cut a road in your heart for simple things.