It was a perfect split of dusk when a terrible thing occurred. It began with the mastiff, that is, the dog that Eddie said was a mastiff but which, really, was probably a quagmire of breeds all smacked together. As the last sunbeams raced from the horizon, they scattered through the fly-torn window screens and stabbed into the poor dog’s winking left eye. It’s important that it was the left eye, you see, because the right one was cloudy with cataracts, a problem which Eddie had said was too minimal to get treatment for. So it was the left eye, which had winked open for only a moment to spy what was making all the noise by the toaster. I had just finished browning some perfect slices of rye and was preparing to slather them with a bit of the fancy butter left over from our trip to the downtown diner the night before. I told Eddie that the place was too expensive, but he said that since he got a raise over at Farmington and Corduroy and Blatsky, he’d be able to afford it. 

So the dog wanted to see, but just at that moment the clouds parted from the horizon and the sunlight singed its left eye. Well, this sent the dog howling, it always was too sensitive, and never made a good guard dog, and it ran out of the kitchen, knocking over a chair on its way out. Whenever the dog was distressed it would go to Eddie, who at that moment happened to be reclined at a just-so angle in his chair, which I thought was ugly but which he refused to get rid of. I had argued that my grandmother had offered us a perfectly good chair that matched better with the curtains, but he would have none of it. The chair she had even reclined, and didn’t get stuck from rusty hinges. He told me I would just have to oil the hinges. So when the dog ran into the living room, it jumped onto the end of the recliner, which should have pushed it down, but because of the sticking hinges, it didn’t. And this dog, being very large, but likely not a mastiff, see-sawed on the edge of the chair, flinging Eddie out of it and across the parlor. 

Now Eddie wasn’t heavy, and, in fact, I had told him to eat more so I wouldn’t have to worry about him wasting away to a shell, but he insisted on watching television during dinner and so he ignored any opportunities for extra helpings. So when he was flung, he flew like a baseball, and crashed head-first into the wall above the fireplace. It took three firemen to pull his body out, and three morticians to clean it. And if Eddie had just listened to me about the chair, I’m sure it would have turned out differently. But I got to eat my toast, so that was one good thing.