Dr. Richter looks like Beethoven with his saucer of wavy dark hair and broad Jewish German forehead, except Dr. Richter exudes a youthful earnestness that makes him seem translucent. He grins and says, Call me Gary, which makes me like him.

He looks into Spot’s eyes and purrs. She allows Dr. Richter to rest his chin on her head and probe for lumps and irregularities. He listens to her heart with his stethoscope and tells me she sounds good. Then he does the same with Fido, who falls into his hands as if she were warm clay. But when he takes the kittens’ temperatures, Fido, who is usually the more passive one, fights harder than Spot, and Dr. Richter instructs me to immobilize her torso by placing my hands and forearms along her sides like a splint.

It reminds me of holding calves for my father while he branded their hind ends, the calf bucking its head and bellowing into my chest. Dr. Richter says good, that’s good, in a soothing, melodic voice, and for just a moment I imagine Dr. Richter is my father and we are in a dark, hay-filled barn.

On my walk home up Dolores in the sun, while Spot presses her nose out the carry-box holes and Fido hides in a corner, I think about the surprising softness of Dr. Richter’s hands, how his knuckles are so beautifully couched in baby fat.

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Nona Caspers’ book of stories Heavier Than Air (University of Massachusettes Press) won the AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Prize. A Book of One Hundred Days will be available from Spuyten Duyvil in Fall 2007. Her work has been honored with a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Grant and Award and a Barbara Deming Grant and Award and has appeared in Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills, among others.

The above is an excerpt of A Book of One Hundred Days.

Other works on Sidebrow: Day Three, Day Nine, Day Ten, Day Eleven, Day Eighteen & Day Twenty-two