The problem was I was making the dog anxious. Whether the dog had been anxious before my arrival was unclear, but certainly all my positive reinforcement of the dog’s anxious behaviours had, since my arrival, dramatically increased that anxiety. Every time the dog sought out my hand my hand responded. When the dog whined, my hand responded. When the dog came to my face to wake me in the mornings, alternately gnashing at a chunk of lego, whining, and slobbering at my mouth or eyes – I patted, I crooned, I soothed. The dog accepted the soothing, was calmed for a short while, and then withdrew. He would back away to sit just slightly out of reach, or lie down, then resume the gnashing and whining. If I failed to respond he would reach up with a paw to prod insistently at my arm or leg.

Now the anxiety was spreading to the whole family: the six year old developed the habit of twisting his forelock into a tangled, ratty knot, then pulling at the knot till hairs came out. The toddler’s progress towards toilet training had ceased. The babe in the womb had suddenly turned breach and now had a foot stuck against the mother’s urethra, making urination an ever-present urge for her, one that was painfully difficult to meet.

I had a looming sense of myself as firmly implicated, and though conversations at mealtimes remained gentle enough and apparently aimless, the air of frustration was hard to miss. There was speculation about sending the dog away, back to the kennels of its origin – just for a time. And there was light conversation about the rudiments of behaviorism – conversation that between two small animal vets seemed a little too easy, as when two brain surgeons on a medical drama pause to offer each other definitions of ‘stroke’ and ‘aneurysm’.

No. Sit. Drop. Good dog. Okay. I will keep my hand by my side. Grief is a problematic habit. Things to praise: quiet independence; the prone position; non-response to food scraps and to the toddler’s squawks and clamberings.  The dog improves.

You’re moving quickly in the mirror’s bevelled edge, accomplishing something in there. It’s something to do with the arrangement of the room. The angle of the walls, or how much airspace there is for expansion and contraction. Arrangements for insulation: firm packed to dampen reverberations, or just muffled with that loose, itchy, glassy fill.

I meant to come and pack my bag in this room but when I enter I see the dog, lying awake in the dark beneath the empty cot. I don’t want to turn on the light. Whatever you’re doing in the edge of the mirror I’m not going to catch it, not going to see it or get it, no matter where I stand. I leave the light off, go to the wall and sit there for a while, on the pile of my clothes.