I knelt on the tile floor. The smell of wet, dirty fur and soap was overpowering. My brother and I were in our swimsuits in my parent's huge shower, washing Zippi after her most recent hunting endeavor. My head was between her front paws, scrubbing and watching the dirty water swirl down the drain. I was as gentle as I could be around the shaved section, trying not to disturb the stitches, which miraculously hadn't broken. I got to the right leg, mindlessly pumping more dog shampoo into my palm, and she flinched, refusing to put her paw back down. I scanned the front and back of her leg, her underarm, the back of her elbow and between the pads of her paw with my eyes, wary of touching any surface. Then I found it. It could have easily been a hair except for its stiffness and angle, straight out and away from her leg.
"Jonah," I said, calmly, "I need tweezers." He handed me a pair of old tweezer scissors, made of clunky metal with angled, fine tips. I grasped the splinter and pulled, met with a sickening amount of resistance, but it was out, between the tweezers and huge, easily a quarter of an inch long. I dropped the forceps into my dad's hand, through the shower door and he examined it.
"This is a cactus quill," he said. "We were in an area with prickly pears." As I rinsed blood from the white fur of her right leg, I realized that this calls for more searching, because there is no way that a cactus would have that much self control.
2 comments:
Your dog gets hurt so much more easily than mine.
Zippy always seems to be hurt, she must be really aggressive and hyper when she's hunting.
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