The Dog, the Street, and the Sky

(an excerpt from the forthcoming novel by E.J. Donovan)

So… I wrote a book.
It has grief, alternate realities, sisters, a dead brother who won’t stay gone, and the German Shepherd who basically holds the universe together.
Chapter One starts with me chasing Zee into traffic. Naturally.

Special thanks to Ian DM Taniels whose push got me to actually post this instead of overthinking it for another six months.

Zee wasn’t just a dog. She was gravity with fur — my pillow, my shadow, my best girl. The kind of presence you built your whole axis around.
Which is why, when she bolted, so did I.

It happened fast. One moment she was at my side, tail wagging, leash looped in my hand, sun slanting through the trees — and the next, she was gone.
A flash of tan and black streaked at the edge of my vision. A squirrel? A cat? It didn’t matter. The leash slipped, my heart jumped, I yelled her name — but the world had already gone quiet in that too-late kind of way.

The street was just ahead.
I didn’t think. I ran.

She lunged across the sidewalk toward the open stretch of asphalt, chasing a dream or maybe a ghost. And then the car. Oh God, the car.
I dove.

I caught her mid-stride, arms wrapped tight around her chest. Felt the thrum of muscle, the damp warmth of fur, the scrape of claws skittering against pavement. She twisted once in confusion — and then the impact.

The world tilted. Metal, motion, blur. For a second I thought I was flying. Or falling. Or dying.
Was this what my mother felt?

The thought cut through me, sharp as glass.
Sirens. Voices. Light. The world kept moving even as mine collapsed inward.

I had been here before: snow on the ground, metal on metal, my mother’s hand slipping away. Only now it was Zee’s leash, the blur of fur, the terrible weight of inevitability.
A sound like thunder inside my skull. And then silence.

Not blackout exactly. More like… displacement. As if my soul had been knocked a few inches to the left and hadn’t found its way back.

No pain at first. Just floating. No light, no tunnel. Only me — and a flicker of memory. Or maybe a story. Or both.

Then something shifted.
The street disappeared. So did the sky.

The echo of tires still hummed in my ears, but when I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else entirely.

Trader Joe’s.
Fluorescents buzzing, shelves of cookie butter. Kara waving from the far end of the aisle.

“Come on!” she called. “They’ve got samples — cookie butter on mini waffles!”

The shimmer of metal again — but this time it was foil on a tray of waffles as Kevin laughed beside her. Zee sniffing the cheese display like nothing had happened at all.

“Ba,” Kevin said, using the name only family ever did. “You didn’t think I’d let you go just yet, did you?”

I tried to answer, but my voice was gone.

The aisles bent at the edges, the world itself not fully solid — as if it could be shaped into something else.
Kevin leaned closer, laugh warm and familiar, like he was about to tell me something important.

“Remember…”

But the rest slipped away, just out of reach. Only one fragment clung afterward — not even his words so much as the shape of them: no spoon.

I didn’t know what it meant. Not yet. But it felt like something I was supposed to remember.

And then Kevin was gone. Like smoke. Like memory. Like my mother.
But Zee stayed a moment longer. Tail wagging, eyes soft, leaning against me like she always had. A heartbeat, a breath, a reminder.

Then she too dissolved, and I was left with nothing but the echo of her weight and the sound of tires in my ears.