This woman pushed a shopping cart towards my department. She was extremely old, and she snarled as she approached the counter. Her lips were inflated by some kind of saline cocktail, and smeared with bright red lipstick. Her hair was a mess of bleached-blonde steel wool. Her skin would tear and her bones would turn into dust if I were to shake her hand. The only life in her that I could see came from her eyes, which froze on me for a while. She didn’t blink once.

“I need to get some colors,” she said.

“What colors?” I asked.

She pulled a piece of wood from the cart and placed it on the counter. The wood was painted a screaming avocado green.

“You scan the color on the computer, you put it in the machine, and it tells me what colors go with it,” the woman said.

I looked at it, back at her, “I’m sorry,” I said, “we don’t have anything in our computer system that does that.”

“The other place does…”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

Along with her green paint sample the woman had two dogs in the shopping cart. She picked up the first dog, a shaking Poodle with a faded pink ribbon around its neck, and set him on the ground. He looked up at me with dirty and weeping eyes. He wouldn’t stop shaking. He wouldn’t stop looking at me. He was saying it to me over and over again: Kill me, kill me, kill me. It was a whisper that graduated into a train wreck.

“I guess I’ll just have to find the colors myself,” the woman said under her breath.

Before walking away the woman reached in the cart and pulled out the second dog. He was a Red Terrier, full-grown, no larger than the size of a house cat, short white fur with brown patches. I heard the woman call him Johnny. She set Johnny on the ground and walked toward the wall of color samples.

The two dogs were left without leashes or attachments, free to roam as they pleased. The poodle just stood there pleading with me, wanting an end to it. I tried not to look, but he kept calling for me. He said to me, You think this is a joke? Every day hurts more than the last! You must free me, you must do this! Just suffocate me, burn me, free me of this disaster I have endured for far, too long! If not for me, do it in the name of love, for I will never forget your kindness and mercy…

Johnny stood there for a while, but slowly he began moving around. He took a couple of steps, paused, then a few more. At first glance I thought he just had his eyes closed, maybe aching for a release of his own, agonizing at the world for delivering him upon his owner. Then I looked closer: Johnny had no eyes whatsoever. My heart melted. I studied the dogs face. His eye sockets were completely hollowed out; the flesh of his eyelids melded, or sewn, over the emptiness.

The old woman kept her back to us, fumbling with the color swatches, using her fleeting strength to decide how her living room and kitchen will look when she dies. Other customers approached, and I helped them with their orders and problems, miniature problem-solver and master of their greener pasture, all the while watching Johnny. This little dog meandered about the facing aisle, then wandered further until he was deep in the thick of the foot traffic swarming the front end of the store. Johnny explored without fear, his little nose twitching when he picked up a new scent. His steps never faltered. He was uncertain, but he moved with an air of proudness. The people walked by without noticing him and if Johnny had assumed victim to his ailment he may have been kicked or trampled repeatedly. But every time it looked as if such a thing would happen, he would escape the offense the same way a lion would swat away a nest of angry bees. Johnny was in control. What a perceptive little beast! The woman told me that she had found Johnny at the SPCA not three months ago. I wished I had got to him sooner.

• Short Stack