YOUTUBE
I couldn't sleep the other night
so I went online
and saw a clip on YouTube
of a teenager in Bosnia
or Serbia or Czechoslovakia
or somewhere,
and he was dangling a small dog
over the railing of an overpass
that looked down 200 feet to a railroad yard
below.
He had two friends with him
and one of them was filming the whole thing
with a cell phone;
the dog was squealing in terror and trying to escape,
the guys all laughed and then the one
holding the puppy said,
“let's see if dogs can fly!”
and with that he let the thing fall,
all the way to that expanse of ground below.
But somehow, even after that long fall
and that bone-shattering impact,
the dog didn't even die-
instead it just lay there in the dirt
moaning in insane pain,
dumbly kicking the one limb that still worked,
the dust climbing up all around it
in the sun.
“Well, I guess they can't!” giggled the kid
who had dropped the dog,
shouting into the camera,
and the clip ended
with all of them laughing hysterically.
After that, I shut the computer off
and went downstairs to the basement
and sat down with my back to the wall
for twenty minutes
and stared at nothing
the entire time.
