“I’m sorry,” he says, helplessly, and she leans into him.
“Hold your pet, please,” the vet tells her, compassionate suddenly, and she falls to her knees, and Ray joins her there. It is just like their wedding. Her knees had hurt for days; the vows seemed to go on forever. Sometimes it seems like they still are. She and Ray lean over Bounder and take him into their arms. She tries looking in the dog’s eyes, but like Ray’s, they are shut.
“Don’t worry, poochy,” says the vet, “this won’t hurt a bit.”
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to everyone who helped me revise and publish these (and other) stories over the past fifteen years. These people include, first and foremost, Rhian Ellis, but also Jennifer Barber, Ira Glass and Starlee Kine, Brian Hall, Bill Kittredge, Ian Jack, Michael Koch, Cressida Leyshon, Amy Grace Lloyd, Halimah Marcus, Fiona McCrae, Ben Metcalf, Ethan Nosowsky, Ann Patchett, Jim Rutman, Ben Samuel, Denise Shannon, Ed Skoog, Ann Vandermeer, Matt Weiland, and Virginia Zech. Finally, I want to thank everyone at Graywolf Press for valuing short fiction in general and mine in particular. I’ve never been treated better by anyone in my life.
J. Robert Lennon is the author of seven novels, including Familiar, Castle, and Mailman, and one previous story collection, Pieces for the Left Hand. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, Playboy, and the New Yorker. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches writing at Cornell University.
Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by BookMobile Design & Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Set in Adobe Garamond Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems in 1989, based on the fonts of Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
Other Books by J. Robert Lennon
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Familiar is as tightly wound as a great Alfred Hitchcock movie. … Lennon has executed a literary puzzle, a marvelous trick of the mind.” —Los Angeles Times
Paperback / Ebook available
A psychologically complex page-turner about one man’s unraveling
“A brilliant, classical, psychological horror story that sticks to and gnaws at the bones. … Signal[s] an important American writer in full command of his powers.” —The Oregonian
Paperback / Ebook available
A collection of micro-fiction about small-town America
“100 very short stories … in which not a word is wasted, and not one of which could be cut. … A rigorous display of storytelling verve, quantity, and control. … It is his most perfect work so far.” —Wyatt Mason, London Review of Books
Paperback / Ebook available
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See You in Paradise Page 24