Mina Tavakoli at n+1:
At the blow of a whistle, each dog, one at a time, was let out onto the grounds and on its doggy way, snuffling the grooves and crevices of the obstacle course in the hunt for a swab doused in an herbal essential oil. The dogs moved evenly, steady as magnetic north, until they appealed to their handlers with glances that functioned like code. This dogsperanto—a language of punctuation marks, canine body cues in expressions of “?” or “!”—met human encouragement in a surrealist covenant between trainer and trainee. Woof begat nod, nod begat pursuit. The lagotto came to a halt at a traffic cone.
“Yes, folks, now what you’re looking at is called ‘fringing.’ Fringing is when a dog is noticing a smell a little too early,” the announcer announced.
I knelt to knead a spaniel at my ankles. The spaniel—a dog with a ramen-noodley curl pattern, a nice hamster warmth, and a tiny heart about two inches deep inside her, which at this second was appreciably whizzing—let out something like a cough.
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