Canis Minor— By Jeremiah David
Artwork by Arlene Tribbia
She braked and for a moment the tires slid and then she hit it. It all happened too quickly
to know. When she got out of the car it was there in the path of the fog lights. A dog, brown and
wet-looking, dragging a bloody leash across the ice. Who would forgive her for such a thing?
She was not aware of any other thought, from the moment it lunged—a sad, toothy gesture—to
the moment she was on her back. The fighting and kicking and crawling all happened without
her. There would be time to wonder what it saw: an attacker or a stranger or a featherweight in
the struggle of wills. For now she could not even isolate the source of her pain, the locus of heat
and severed nerves, from the static of her body’s clanging signals. And yet she was getting away,
had in fact already escaped, running faster on her feet than it could shamble, a trail of goose-
down from her mangled coat, the feathers hanging in the air like snowflakes. Getting away,
running away, driving away. A word for a place that had never existed—that stretch of highway,
just beyond the curve, where the thing to fear would be behind her.
Jeremiah David is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who now teaches English at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest.