NICK, THE SEEING EYE DOG (KYLE HEMMINGS)
Sometime after the accident, after they had built that three-way intersection on Main, I went blind. The head surgeon, some big shit guy from Wagapeetee, went on about eye transplants, rods, cones, Rod Sterling or sterling rod, probabilities, chances, and how he liked my hands. I said nothing doing and bug off. I said two glass eyes are better than holes. Still, I had afterimages of runny mascara and the come-here rouge. Why? Said Dr. Wagapeetee, life will be endless night; we have donors from good homes. Some had perfect breasts, teeth. No one will recall the loss. Don’t live alone. I’ve seen too many phantom lives destroyed from a lack of focus. Then a friend of mine who worked at Home Depot making key duplicates suggested I get a seeing eye dog. His name was Nick. And we went everywhere together. The circus. Under the turnstiles. The horse track. Down Main Ave. and even into Vantage Boutique. Nick was big and fluffy, with a warm wet nose and I always pictured him as black, perhaps leaning towards Labrador, but settling on Finnish. A Laprador. My friends, the ones I had left, said no, Nick was part beige and part dark beige with one glass eye (green?) and he’s so small that he could drown in his own puddle and his bark was so shrill and high that you might miss it or it will feel like a tickle. But I knew Nick wasn’t any of those things. Nick was a troubadour’s bout of triumphant call. Nick was a sharptooth in the side of every pernicious dog doomer. Nick was closet rain for the claustrophobic. Nick was the Bay of Senegal when your father went nearsighted and colonial. I likedit, I likeditalot, when in time, when in the wake of this farce of independence that I learned to throw off, Nick would take me for a walk.