31.
Out a cafe window, a ragged-looking mutt’s body turned away from the direction the owner at the other end of the leash had wanted to turn. The mutt quickly bowed its head, seen and felt by him as an apology for miscalculating the direction its master wanted to turn. The mutt looked up at the owner. Demanding to be noticed, it took the length of the leash hanging closest to its snout into its teeth and shook it vigorously. This evoked in him at the window, with now his coffee cup held suspended, a sensation that the mutt was asking for it, and how right the owner had been to then jerk on the leash, hard enough for the mutt to have to yelp. His mind held those sensations a little too long, till they made him uncomfortable, till he realized that the sensations he had just felt, of the mutt asking for it and of the rightness of the reprimand, were not his own, were not anything he on his own would have felt, or wanted to feel, that they came from elsewhere, not from within him, came like outsiders who take over and settle on native lands. He rose from his table; he knew it was time to leave his job and look for another.