A Sunday afternoon on Queen East in Toronto

She had a tattoo of a broken heart on her pale, beefy shoulder and she was screaming at her dog.

“Leon, C’mere, dammit! I’m talking to you, you get your ass over here NOW!!”

Leon, who was leashed but still in effortless control, didn’t seem in the least intimidated or concerned by her threats and continued to poke about beneath the benches in the park. The woman, part of her face frozen by paralysis, the rest twisting in fury, was yanking at the leash with her one good arm from a wheelchair. “Come here you dirty bastard! I’m not telling you again! You won’t be nothing but a ghost when I’m done!” The dog would not give, and this woman– so angry and wounded– was like some horrible avatar burning through the middle of the summer day, and it was just too much, so the people walking by averted their gazes, as if the possibility of something so ugly, true and near, so heart-breaking, did not exist at all.