With a plastic grocery bag wrapped around the edge of a dustpan I reach down and shovel up a liquid pile Lily left on the basement floor. Her diarrhea is a dripping mess slopped across the tiles.
Her blood results are back and it’s not her pancreas, the vet tells me. They are the first words I heard today and not good news. If her pancreas was deficient we could treat it but instead we remain wedged in a darkness that welcomes us back to a place perfectly fitted our body.
What next? Lily has created a widening fissure where my anxiety and I stand on one side and wave goodbye to the calm, even-tempered normal stuff on the other side. Goodbye.

The vet asks, I need a fresh stool sample, not an old one where the bacteria may have changed. Minutes later I am outside in the snow with an old coffee scoop dipped into a pile slippery like egg yolks and spooning it into an old Ragu sauce jar. It now sits with its cap on in the coffee holder between the truck seats on its way to the vet.

I ran with both Hershey and Lily today, their fuzzy heads bobbing in tandem and shadows rippling across the ground. One gentle, droopy-eared image next to Lily’s pointed, stern profile. At home she curls and leans against my legs and I nearly lose balance.