The small child stood, frozen
in the burgeoning afternoon heat
of a Georgia spring. Cars flew past him,
his eyes growing wilder with terror by the second.
They were fixed on nothing in particular. In his hands
he held a house key; yet he wasn’t anywhere near a door,
facing the open road, his feet planted firmly, head shaking almost imperceptibly left to right, left to right.

I passed him, thinking it odd that a
seven or eight-year-old should be standing there half an hour after the bus had dropped him off. I almost didn’t turn back around. Shouldn’t his mother be somewhere close by?
But something said turn, turn, turn. And so I did,
to the annoyance of my own son, who thinks
I worry too much. Mom, he said, we kids
take care of ourselves just fine.

I pulled up alongside the boy, 
who looked something like one of those
Pompeii statues set in stone the precise moment
the horror struck. Are you okay? I asked him. He
nodded left to right, left to right. I parked the car and
got out, approaching slowly, afraid he might be afraid of me.
He shook his head yes, he lived nearby, pointed two houses up.
He shook his head no, nobody was home.

He shook his head yes, he wanted me to walk with him
and no he hadn’t tried to get in yet today. We took a single step. He stopped, hand raised, trembling. He spoke then. “Ddddog,”
he said, gesticulating wildly toward the grey house.Then
I heard the low growl. I saw the sign: Beware of Dog. 
The boy stuttered that he can never run
fast enough, the dog always gets him 
before he can make it to his door.

I tell him I won’t let it happen today,
say he is safe with me. Sure enough the dog is
down on his haunches, mouth watering, waiting to pounce
at the first whiff of raw fear, which he considers his invitation
to attack. We walk past, me staring down the beast, staving off his self-indulgent bullying with my burning anger at the situation. We are at his door, where the boy tells me it is scary every day. He says his mommy has to work a long time.

He will be alone for a very long time, he says.
I make him promise to tell mommy the dog was not chained up today and that he was very scared, but his eyes go all sad.
She tells me I have to not be so afraid because I have to be
the big boy, he says. He looks so very small that my heart
is about to crack right in two, and I don’t want to leave
him there. But he says he has to go so nobody
will know he talked to a stranger.

He disappears behind a door three times
his size and turns the lock from inside the dark house
that affords him some measure of safety if not company.
And I stand there thinking how I hate that little children get frightened and nobody ever knows and how stupid the people who own mean dogs are and how impossible it is to take care of all the innocents hemorrhaging fear and loss, and how
there are no easy answers, no magic wands to wave.