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a dog dies

Two days ago a man named Ian Brennan hit and killed my family’s dog with his car while turning a corner on Hickory Street. Traveling from my house you can take two lefts and then a right and then drive straight for about half a mile and if you look close enough you can see the blood, dark red and now faded but still so penetratingly there. Thirty minutes after the dog--whose name was Anna--had been hit, my mother and father and I were deciding on how to bring the dead body home and eventually my mother called our family friend Kate Burton and said something ominously vague like Please come to the corner on Hickory Street. Something bad happened. I’m sorry. Just come. Kate Burton, who lived only a few minutes away on Robin Drive, arrived in her red Kia Sedona and got out and saw the blood and the dog and then said I’m so sorry and picked up Anna and put her in the backseat of her car. We all slowly and senselessly got into the car, trying to avoid sight of the dog. Wait, my father said as we left. The blood. What about the blood. We can’t just leave that on the road. My mother--she could call the pet cremation service and call the veterinarian and she could even put on the surgical gloves that had always been lying around in the kitchen desk drawer. But she couldn’t look at the blood on the road, and she could not clean it, and she could not call someone to clean it. We can’t leave that goddamn blood on the road, my father said as Mrs. Burton tentatively started putting the car in reverse. We have to clean it up, he urged. My mother’s eyes started welling. She bit her lip with such intensity that an instinctive yelp of pain emerged out of her throat and escaped through her mouth. No, her eyes seemed to say. You’re asking too much, her shaking hands said.