In the summer of nineteen-eighty-seven, my dog died, and it affected my childhood more significantly than anything that had come before or since. I was eleven years old and I lived with my parents in a white two-story Georgian style house that fronted onto a busy main road. Our backyard was a flat stretch of well-manicured grass that opened onto a small forest. There was no fence. As you can imagine this setting was Heaven for a little boy. I spent the long hot days of summer playing back there but never venturing too far into the woods for fear of being scolded by my father. Due to the traffic on the main road, I almost never played on our front lawn. I learned from an early age that balls and toys hit or thrown too hard could enter the busy traffic and be crushed by the cars, buses or huge eighteen wheelers that rushed by heedless of the small blonde boy just yards away.

However, for some reason that day, I was out on the front lawn when it happened. It seems strange now, but at that time it was quite normal for my father to open our front door and let our dog, Luca, out onto the porch to eat and drink. It never occurred to any of us what could happen... the tragedy that lurked just forty feet away.

I believe it was morning, not early but certainly not lunch time. I sat on the grass playing with something... marbles... army men... I can't be sure. But I remember the sound of the screen door opening, the harsh squeal of metal on metal and the stretching rusty spring... then a black flash zoomed past me. I looked up in shock to see Luca running full out, he hadn't barked, hadn't made a sound he just... ran.

A woman in a brown dress was walking a dog on the other side of the street, oblivious to the horror about to be visited upon us in the next few seconds. Luca entered the roadway and was struck instantly by a truck, its wheels bounced brutally over his torso as the driver skidded to a loud shuddering stop... far too late.

I remember my father rushing out onto the street and scooping up the dog. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth, its eyes were open and it seemed to be looking at me in a quizzical way. 'Why?'

The truck driver was sorry, he said as much and my father briskly answered, "It's alright, not your fault." Then it was over. Luca was dead.

My father took him away and I did not follow. I wanted to but I didn't. As much as I loved Luca I was too afraid to follow. I was a coward, always have been I suppose. I had not risen during all of this and I still held some useless thing in my hand, perhaps only fist full of dirt, I don't remember.

A man approached from the sidewalk, a stranger. He strode up purposefully onto our lawn and stood over me staring down. I looked up at him, he was average. The most average man in the world. His hair was brown, his eyes were brown, his shirt and pants were brown. He looked as if he was trying to blend in with the dirt or melt straight down into the ground and go totally unnoticed. As I looked up the sun seemed to move slightly so that it was directly behind his head, throwing his features into darkness and creating a corona of hazy light around him.

He spoke in a voice without accent. It was not deep like a man's voice or high like a woman's. It was just a voice and he asked, "Is that animal dead?"

It seemed such a strange thing to ask and such a strange way to ask it, that I wasn't sure how to answer. The fact of it was I didn't know. I was a child and death was unreal to me, something unexplored and unknown.

He waited patiently, not moving at all until finally, I nodded.

He turned then, without saying a word and for a moment, less than a moment perhaps, he was no longer a man. He was something else. He was black and featureless, like a shadow that had pulled itself up from the pavement. He had too many arms and legs and his neck was incredibly long. Then he was a man again and he walked silently past me into our backyard where my father had already started digging a hole in which to bury my poor silly, funny little dog.

They spoke back there, but I couldn't hear what they were saying. I thought that I should go and tell my father that the man was not a man, but I knew he wouldn't believe me so I did nothing. I did try to explain what I had seen to my mother later that day. She was far more understanding than my father, who was a stern and impatient man. She was less likely to call me stupid and make me feel foolish, but even in her kind and tender reply, I heard the condescension and disbelief.

For the rest of that day, I stayed inside the house. My room was full of toys that, during the summer months at least, went mostly ignored. I was an outside kid. I would always choose running, jumping and climbing over G.I. Joe's and Lego blocks. Our backyard and the forest beyond was where I held my big adventures. Trekking through the darkest jungles like Indiana Jones... swinging through the trees like Tarzan... climbing to the crows nest of my pirate ship.

But now my little friend was buried back there, his furry broken body just a few feet below the surface. I put down the Spiderman comic I had been flipping through and walked tentatively to my bedroom window.

I rose up on my tiptoes to look down into the backyard and there it was. The small mound of disturbed earth was very close to the edge of the forest. There was no headstone. The shock of that was what sent me thundering down the stairs and into the family room.

"He needs a headstone!" I yelled, to my mother who was sitting on the couch knitting.

"Lower your voice, young man." My father ordered without looking away from the television.

My mother put down her knitting and smiled sadly at me. "What did you say, Joey?"

I had a feeling my mother knew exactly what I had said and by asking me to repeat it she was giving herself some time to decide on how to reply.

I took a deep breath. "Luca needs a headstone. That's what you do when someone dies. You bury them and put a headstone."

"Ridiculous," my father muttered and my mother threw a stern look at his back.

"Yes," she said. "I'm sure your father will help you make a headstone, won't you John?"

He turned, his face looking savage for just a moment. The look in my mother's eyes stopped him cold.

"Oh... yeah... sure."

He snapped off the television and took me out to the garage with a look of disgust, well hidden from my mother, on his face.

I stood in the cool darkness as he rummaged around looking for something that we could use. This was all done for my mother's sake. It was plainly apparent that he thought the idea of a headstone for a dog was the stupidest thing he had ever heard.

The garage was big and very full. So full, in fact, that there was no room for either of our two cars. Each fall my mother would force dad to clean it up so that, at least her little hatchback could pull in out of the weather. On those occasions, I was always volunteered to help much against my will.

But it was summer and so instead of a neat and orderly arrangement of tools, sports equipment and camping gear on shelves and a Toyota in the parking spot. There were piles of junk, drop cloths, broken doodads and gardening implements strewn all over. We had had some work done earlier in the year and the evidence was literally everywhere. There was even a huge mound of dirt in the corner that was destined for my mother's new flower bed out front if dad ever got to it.

Something greyish-white peeked out from behind that pile of dirt and I pointed it out to my father who was holding a hubcap up for inspection.

"What's that?" I asked.

He stepped over my old wagon and looked where I was pointing. "Oh, yeah that'll work," he said. Coming from my father that acknowledgment counted as high praise and I felt a sudden wave of pleasure and relief at his words.

He pulled a half-buried flagstone out of the dirt and brushed it off.

"We need to engrave it!" I said.

Dad looked down and all of the pride he had so recently installed in me was flushed away. His look said 'You are so fucking stupid' so clearly that I jerked back as if he had hit me.

"We can't engrave it. Use your head for Christ's sake, Joe!"

I felt hotness in my cheeks and my throat closed as tears threatened to fill my eyes. I wanted to answer back. To tell him I wasn't 'stupid' even though he had not used that exact word. I wanted to tell him he was stupid for letting Luca out of the front door and that it was his fault my little dog was dead. But my father was big and loud and then the moment passed and I had said nothing at all.

He had turned away and begun rummaging in one of the tool bench drawers, eventually producing a thick black magic marker. He uncapped it and handed it to me.

"Here, do you know what you want to write?" Now he sounded bored. He put the flagstone down on the floor in front of me waiting.

 I carefully printed 'Luca' on the stone and below that R.I.P. in big block letters. I had seen this on headstones in movies and television shows and I knew what it meant... Rest in Peace. That was fine. I tried to imagine Luca resting in peace up on a cloud with my Nana and Pappy. Running a playing with all the other little dogs who had been run over that day and then the tears did come. They streamed down my hot face and before I could prevent it a hurt little gasp escaped from my throat.

My father put his hand on my head and ruffled my blond hair, but said nothing. A sob wracked through me hurting both my throat and my back as I crouched over the flagstone. Tears dripped onto it and mixed with the dirt creating little muddy spots.

I armed the tears away and forced myself to stop crying. The garage was completely silent for a moment and then my father cleared his throat and picked up the flagstone.

He carried it down to the fresh patch of dirt by the edge of the forest and thumped it forcefully into the ground on its edge. Then he removed it and repeated the process a few more times until it was set well into the earth.

When it was done he turned to look down on me. He was over six feet tall and for a moment I thought of the strange man with too many arms and legs and the long neck.

"It was just a dog you know... not a person." He said. "Maybe we'll get another one..."

I didn't want another dog, but I didn't tell him that. I didn't say anything at all and after a moment he reached down and ruffled my hair again before heading back into the house.

Once he was gone I let the tears come and I said goodbye to my friend silently in my mind, very sure that Luca would hear me in that same magical way that God could hear you when you prayed.

Then there was a noise and I saw something dark move in the forest out of the corner of my eye. When I looked back at the headstone I decided I was done saying goodbye, so I went back up to my room and cried myself to sleep.