When you speak from your heart; and say the words your soul has only dared to whisper; that's when miracles happen.
I hope you were going
somewhere important when you drove so fast down the road on Friday night.
Perhaps we’d feel better if we could imagine that you were a doctor rushing
somewhere to deliver a baby or ease somebody’s pain. The life of our dog to
shorten someone’s suffering - that might not have been so bad.
But even though all we saw of
you was your car’s black shadow and its jumping tail lights we know too much
about you to believe it. You saw the dog, you stepped on your brakes, you felt
a thump, you heard a yelp and then my nephew’s scream. Your reflexes are good,
we know, because you jumped on the accelerator again and got out fast. You
didn’t bother to look, so I’ll tell you what the thump and the yelp were. They
were Tessa, a six-month-old Maltese Poodle puppy; white, with brown and black
markings. An aristocrat, with an air of superior belonging; but she clowned and
she chased, she loved people and children and other dogs as much as any mongrel
on earth.
I’m sorry you didn’t stick
around to see the job you did, though a dog dying by the side of the road isn’t
a pretty sight. In less than two seconds you and that car of yours transformed
a living being that had been beautiful, clean, soft and loving into something
dirty, ugly and broken. I hope to God that when you hit my dog you had for a
moment the sick, dead feeling in the throat and down to the stomach that we
have known ever since. And that you feel it whenever you think about speeding
down a side road again.
Because the next time some
eight-year-old boy might be wobbling along on his first bicycle. Or a very
little one might wander out past the gate and into the road in the moment it
takes his parent to bend down to pull out a weed the way my puppy got away from
me. Or perhaps you’ll be really lucky again, and only kill another dog, and break
the heart of another family…
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