Consider pain. Consider the discomfort as it moves from subject to observer. Consider the neighbour’s dog I spied one day sitting at the end of the driveway.

The house across the street is inhabited by a son and his father and occasional other people. The father had slow and stiff parents. Like his parents, he too is slow and stiff. When he leaves his house, he lowers himself into his car backwards, swings in his legs, and beckons the door shut by bending his fingers on the handle and letting the slant of the driveway do the rest.

One day their dog was on the driveway. It was a black dog with a body like a fat sausage. The father put a blanket on the backseat of the car and motioned, with a swing of his arm, for the dog to get into the car. The dog pulled itself up with its front legs and hobbled. It hobbled over to the car door and I could not look.

When the father and the dog returned, his son came outside. With the lure of an almost empty jar of peanut butter, the dog was got out of the car. I did not watch. Only later I saw the dog on the driveway.

Surely the dog was in pain. My eyes appraised the suffering. The film as it played was edited by thoughts that rushed about frantically looking for subtitles to the silent action through the window. Had that dog not run away just last year? Surely it was not so old! What had happened that now it could barely walk? This animal is suffering and its owner has offended my sight by letting it be so! Have they been careless? Did they do this?

The subtitles skew toward drama, the way increasingly shocking videos used to automatically queue up on Youtube. Inclined by fear, imagination defaults to what is unkind.

An emergency pet services van came to the house a few days later and took the dog away. That’s all I saw. The rest is interpretation.