In a small town, the weary figure of a man walking his dog, chain lead strung slackly between the man’s right hand and the dog who follows a good dozen feet behind him, a dog so aged, overweight, and arthritic it’s a miracle of sorts that it can move at all. Links of the chain drag on the sidewalk. The man wears an ancient army coat with a fur-lined hood and what seem to be ancient fur-lined bedroom slippers on his feet. He never turns his head to regard the dog’s progress or to assess its well-being but in essence ignores it. Soon it will rain, the man says to himself, it will be good for the corn, although the fields outside of town are vast panes of white ice in the last light of late afternoon, with no farmer here giving corn seed a thought for another eight weeks at least. What the dog thinks, we can only hazard a guess. The man shuffles forward a few steps but the dog has stopped, and the lead gradually grows more taut. Soon it will rain, it will be good for the flowers. The man pulls more earnestly on the lead. The dog, its legs rigid, locked, turns its nose away from the man, paying him no more attention than the man has afforded the dog. Standing there quietly and unmoving, the two of them joined by fifteen feet of chain that hangs at its lowest point mere inches off the concrete, a parabola of chrome steel links between fixed points. A few raindrops begin to fall, hesitantly, as though the clouds above might be reconsidering.

– Ralph Culver