When my mother sent Phee off to college, she’d lamented her empty nest and filled it with Pericles—part standard poodle, part demon. Mom doted on him. Pericles had a full wardrobe and was only allowed to eat a homemade diet with ingredients like scrambled organic eggs and rice and sweet potatoes that Mom culled from the canine cookbook she read with religious fervor. But it was his eyes that bothered me the most; the dark, bottomless pits followed me around the room like one of those haunted paintings. I secretly called him Scary Perry when Mom wasn’t around.
