Dogs by Nancy Kress

bed, careful not to wake Brenda. Once he was awake, he could never get back to sleep. Something to do with getting older, he supposed. At twenty-two he had been able to sleep through a fire alarm; sixty-seven was a different matter.
    Del padded to the kitchen, where Folly slept on her little bed. The Chihuahua liked to be near the heat register. Folly woke, too, and gave him a friendly bark and tail wag, all two pounds of her.
    Putting on water for coffee, Del could still hear the Dormund dogs snarling and barking. He tried to catch sight of them through the window, but apparently they were in back. The barks sounded…enraged, somehow. What could have upset them like that? Well, whatever it was, Del would have to talk to Ed about it. Brenda needed her sleep; the chemo was hard on her. Yes, he’d call Ed later, at a decent hour, even though everything in Del recoiled from the idea. He hated confrontation of any kind.
    Folly yawned, stretched, and wandered to her water bowl.
    Two blocks away, Ellie Caine stirred in her warm bed. One of the Greyhounds in the kitchen, it sounded like Song, whimpered. Probably had a bad dream. Ellie shuddered to think what Song might be dreaming.
    She’d rescued the four Greyhounds from a race track, where conditions were horrifying. Dogs were trained to run by starving them and then forcing them to chase a piece of meat on a mechanical arm that moved faster and faster. Sometimes, even though it was supposed to be illegal, the meat was replaced by a live rabbit with its legs broken to make it scream. If a Greyhound couldn’t run fast enough, or after its racing days were over, the poor dog was killed.
    Ellie wished she could rescue more Greyhounds, but even four were a tight fit for her small house and yard. She was passionately determined to make up to Song, Music, Butterfly, and Chimes everything terrible that had been done to them. She rushed home from work at noon to spend her lunch hour with them; she took them every day to the dog park; she stayed home with them every night. They were her friends, her companions, and so much more reliable and loving than people ever were.
    Song still whimpered, and Ellie decided to give him five more minutes. Then if all wasn’t quiet in the kitchen, she’d leave her cozy bed and go to the greyhounds.
    Just five more minutes.
    Steve Harper sat on a sofa at the Webster Funeral Home. He couldn’t have described the sofa, or the room, or the funeral home. Nothing registered, nothing except the mental picture of Davey, in that spun-out moment when the brown mastiff raised its head and looked straight at Steve, a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth—
    â€œMr. Harper?” someone said.
    Hanging from its mouth onto Davey’s body…
    â€œMr. Harper!”
    Slowly the funeral director came into focus. The man, the room, the purpose for this terrible visit. And then one thing more.
    â€œAs I was saying, Mr. Harper, FEMA’s temporary regulations make it impossible for us to go forward with little David’s viewing, service, or burial just now. But we can still choose the casket and make—”
    The thing sat on the fireplace mantel. A statue, china or glass…
    â€œâ€”all the other arrangements for the eventual—”
    A statue of a dog.
    The brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey’s body...
    Steve jumped from the sofa, seized the obscene decoration, and smashed it as hard as he could to the floor.

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    Cami Johnson dropped the IV bag on her way to her patient’s curtained corner of the ER, caught it just before it hit the floor, and banged her head on a metal linen shelf while straightening up. The fall wouldn’t have hurt the sealed plastic bag, but the bump hurt Cami. She blinked back tears even as she looked around to see if Rosita Perez had noticed.
    The charge nurse noticed everything.