Dreaming of dogs: The image from yesterday's dream has faded like a sun splotch in my vision, but the indigo feeling has soaked into my bones. I recall walking through a crowded festival jammed with booths, and ahead I see the bar and enter.

These busy people are oblivious to me -- it's that sort of dream where I am insubstantial and desperate. I lost my dogs. I ended up leaving through the bar's back door and wandering, then I was driving and the sun was setting. I was lost and without the dogs and the truck was overheating. I know each of these feeling really well, but my crafty bitchy subconscious swirled them all together in a star of sharp little blades.

About the coppery stains coating my truck where Lily bled…That one is still coming to me in little spurting images. The fine pointed brushes that I dip in a well of ragged words still hit the canvas with limp wet smacks. Damn things.

I picked up her stick and realized she had accidentally bitten herself. I looked down and her paws and front legs were slick with red. The drops from her tongue fell fast. Back home I tried to see the cut and I kept pulling at the blade of grass stuck to the underside of her tongue, then I realized it's what I had feared as I glanced at the fine misty blood among the copious dripping. She had punctured something that was squirting out in a fine little stream, just like a blade of long field grass.

To the vet. Immediately the Dr asks her two attendants to lift Lily and get her on the exam table. Wherever the poor dog turns blood flies. Doc shaves a quick little patch of Lily's fur that drops off like a caterpillar, injects her, and I watch Lily's eyes grow darker darker darker, until she is dazed and her blood pressure drops.

Doc opens the door. Get a mop! she yells.

She tells me, It's an artery. We'll see if it needs sutures, but once the bleeding stops and it clots, after 24 hours we're generally home free.

Is Lily a patient here, she asks.

No, but Bandit had come in, so we're in your system, I said.

Number?

Address or phone?

Phone.

Um. I say, not sure. Wow, I guess I never call it, I tell her. I couldn't retrieve my number from among the cluttered crap in my head that had been blown back by the gust of fright as Lily dripped all over me the truck herself.