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Then I looked at the pieces. In very ancient times, in the land of Canaan, righteous men would sacrifice bigger animals than this to God. When they cut up a lamb, they would be left with big, bloody, significant pieces in their hands, and their covenant would be a real covenant.

I seasoned the strips of goldfish, put a bit on my finger, lit a match and brought the flame up to the flesh of the fish until it was a little charred, and my finger too began to smell like a steak. Then I threw my head back, opened my mouth wide, and let the first strip of fish fall straight into my digestive system.

I did the same thing with the rest of the fish, and when I was finished I sat down to contemplate my dying dog, a fourteen year old cocker spaniel bitch who was suffering from heart failure. For fifteen days I sat on the armchair and looked at her, at her dry, lolling tongue, her rapid breathing, her dulling eyes. During the course of these fifteen days I gave her food and water, and of course, medication. She ate and drank next to nothing, and she threw up the medicine. I hooked her up to an IV, into which I injected the drugs, and this helped a little.

I was sorry that I hadn't treated the fish to an IV too, but I immediately dismissed this thought, on the grounds that it didn’t seem possible to find a vein in such a tiny goldfish. Altogether, it didn’t seem possible to find a vein in any fish, even a herring.

After fifteen days of continuous dying, when she no longer ate, stopped drinking, and the medication too became worthless—I acceded to open the medicine cabinet, and prepared an anesthetic injection from which she’d never wake up.

I went up to her, I stroked her. She licked my fingers with her cleft, sore tongue. She licked my face, her sores scratched my skin, but I didn’t mind.

I laid her on my desk, rolling gentle words around on my tongue, murmuring them to her and stroking her orange head while in my other hand was the hypodermic needle.

Even before I’d finished injecting her, my dog closed her eyes and fell asleep. I stroked her and released her neck from the collar bearing all her metal immunization disks, each of them engraved with my address and the promise of a reward for her safe return.

I sat down on my barstool and looked at my fat dog, wondering how long it would take from the moment of the injection for sleep to change into death, and how exactly this changing of the guard took place.

My pet’s breathing grew increasingly heavy, deep, and full of significance. Each breath thought itself the last, but another one would always follow to steal away its title. Until . . . It was finished. The dog had had its day.

I called the vet. It was the middle of the night and I woke him up. A few days earlier, when I’d gone to consult him, he’d mumbled something about a man who buried pets for seventy shekels. I asked him for the phone number. He grumbled "Can’t it wait till morning?" and immediately read out the number.

I spoke to the gravedigger and said what I had to say, and was just about to hang up when he suddenly broke in:

"I hope you don’t think you’re coming with me, Miss . . ."

“Excuse me?” I said in astonishment. “Why not? It’s my dog you’re burying after all. I have every right to be present at the event. What have you got to hide?”

“Listen, babe,” he barked, “your seventy shekels is no big deal. Dogs die every other minute. I bury them in the dunes, near the sea. I do it at night, quietly, by myself. Take it or leave it.”