• Take one soulful, loyal best friend: Spot, the family dog, a mostly Beagle mutt with black and brown spotted white fur, a twinkle of compassionate wisdom in her big, beseeching eyes, and espresso bean-colored, long silky ears, and put her in a basement.
  • Set out on a ping-pong table amongst neatly stacked records and baseball and ice hockey equipment on a surgical pad in following order: two sterile gowns, three sterile masks, three pairs of sterile gloves, intubation equipment, IV catheter, anesthetic medication, surgical knives, retractors, and a bottle of Betadine.
  • Mix in one workaholic, successful, alexithymic, urologist father, the son of an immigrant farmer from Biella, in the Piedmonte area of Italy.
  • Add one vivacious, fecund mother. The oldest daughter of twelve children, a nurturer of her siblings without a childhood, pregnant with an unplanned fourth child that she desires but her husband is ambivalent about.
  • Fold in three children all under the age of ten. Have the ten-year-old son (future heroin addict and then reformed social worker) be blood-phobic and want desperately to have NOTHING to do with this Grand Guignol event.
  • Mix in the eight-year-old daughter with a tough facade but a hypersensitivity underneath, who will become a psychiatrist with trauma expertise.
  • The eight-year-old girl will have no children.
  • Pour the six-year-old son who believes that witnessing his family’s experimentation on Spot is “the coolest thing ever,” and will brag about it in his memoir as a reason why he chose to become a world-renowned, robotic cardiothoracic surgeon.
  • Combine the father’s orders to the ten-year-old son, barricading himself in the bathroom, that he should “Stop acting like a sissy and put on the surgical gloves, mask, and gown.”
  • Have the eight-year-old daughter put on gloves and masks to help calm Spot while the father administers IV medication and hydration.
  • Have the father intubate Spot, then sterilize with Betadine and shave Spot’s white furred belly.
  • Let the buzzing fluorescent lighting highlight Spot’s vulnerable, swollen belly.
  • Have the father swiftly and deftly slice through Spot’s abdominal skin.
  • Have the daughter worry that Spot had been given a human dose of anesthetic and ask, “Is Spot’s heart supposed to be beating so fast?”
  • Have the father mumble under his mask, “All is well,” dismissing her fear as that of a silly little girl.
  • Have Daniel, the oldest son, whose face is a ghostly white, break out into a sweat, hands trembling and body swaying.
  • Have the father snap at Daniel, who’s holding the retractor, “Stop shaking! Retract the skin and guts more!”
  • Have the father’s face tighten with disgust as he yanks Spot’s pinkish white uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes from her abdominal cavity.
  • Have the eight-year-old daughter pray, “Please God, give Dad, Daniel, and Spot the strength to survive this torture.”
  • Have the eight-year-old daughter feel grateful this time to be a girl, because a girl gets off easy with her only job to throw the bloody rags into a heap on the cold cement floor.
  • Have the eight-year-old daughter silently turn to stone as she witnesses the tiny unborn litter of eight puppies from within Spot’s womb slowly suffocate on the family’s ping pong table.
  • Let Spot, the ever-forgiving survivor, withstand the family’s horror show.
  • Have the pregnant mother, who had refused to partake, come downstairs weeping, wanting to check on Spot.
  • Let the mother and daughter clean up the bloody mess, then stay with Spot until she wakes up.
  • Have the eight-year-old daughter caress Spot and whisper in her ear, “So sorry about your babies. I love you.”