The woman walks. Tonight, she’s in the shimmering green dress, and it turns the streetlights into disco-ball pebbles that roll down the sidewalk with her. She walks with a purpose, imagining she dents the concrete. Her pulse is quick and silent. She’s waiting, and she’s stopped at a corner. She’s glancing around, left then right then kitty-corner then right again. She glances then at her left hand so she can find the veins on the back. The veins tell the story of her night. This is when they pop the most. There is pressure in anticipation. Off beyond her hand, which is still her object of fixation, a small dog trots without an owner. There’s a three-toned jingle with every step. It’s wearing the collar. She approaches. With care, she kneels down, conscientious of her dress that doesn’t want to bend and her cream shoes that want to scuff. She takes her left hand slowly toward the doodle, approaching from the front. She’s learned over years of the same maneuver that this technique keeps the little things calm. It might keep her calm, too. With a hand bent as though she holds a conductor’s baton, she runs her fingertips through the gingerbread-brown hair on the dog’s head (though it’s too dark for her to see its true cinnamon) and onward down its back. She brings her hand again to its head, and again to its back, enjoying the way her fingers occasionally make their way into tight cinnamon curls and sometimes flatten them. This, the work of a typical night. The dog nuzzles its head down for more, responding softly to the lessons the green dress woman has learned. That, at least, is the story she tells herself to explain the dog. She moves slightly to its left so she can have the leverage she needs. She now moves her left hand transversally around to the dog’s belly, and her right does the same thing in the opposite direction. With two hands around the creature who has—mercifully, it’s fair to say—been bred to into copious ignorance and therefore proper bliss, she scoops the cute thing up into her arms and rotates it so its back is towards the ground and its face towards hers. She looks into its eyes for a long moment, and she longs: this creature has won the lottery. Its life exists for love, by design, and it has not the mind to know that nor the mind to question. It simply is, and doesn’t know that it is, which makes it all the more. She sees the two expected objects attached to its collar, each rather light, supported from underneath by the breast curls. On the left is a three-bar contraption, the dinging ringing thing she always hears and whose distinct tribunal presence she’s developed a complex emotion towards. This emotion is something somber and excited, something sweet since there’s a sweet creature involved, and something bitter, too. On the right is a small locket. What kind of dog owner attaches a locket to the dog’s collar? A dog owner of a particular sort, the type of owner she’s found herself acquainted with through this blissful dog. She’s never met the owner, just the dog. She pops the locket, distinctly feeling its two opposing halves, one on her thumb and the other on her bony index finger, a finger on which she swears to herself she can sometimes see a blue vein, and which vein tonight looks rather striking against her disco-ball green dress. As always, a piece of paper flutters out of the locket. She picks it up off the ground and reads the address scrawled in scratch. Another night, another life.