Writing is a lonely sport. During the day, when my daughters are in school and my wife is at work, I sometimes feel like I’ve simply been forgotten, that at any moment they will come bursting back through the door to take me with them. The house has its own rhythm when my family is home, but when it’s just me, it’s as if something is absent, the hum of the refrigerator not enough to compensate for what is missing. The thing is, there’s something about that odd sort of loneliness that I like. I’ve spent plenty of time writing in coffee shops with headphones on to block out the noise, but mostly, nowadays, writing full time, I work from home. I think it helps that I play music when I’m writing, that the keyboard for my computer clicks furiously as I type, that I hear the words in my head, but I know for sure that it helps that I’ve got a dog curled up at my feet.

As I was finishing Touch, we had to put our Golden Retriever, Hopper, to sleep. He was ten years old, and we’d had a rough winter: he had to have an eye removed, a surgery that left him with an almost comical appearance, the stitched shut, sunken eye-socket scarred into a shape that made Hopper look like he was perpetually winking. Then, just as he seemed fully recovered from that surgery, he blew out his knee. On our vet’s recommendation, we decided to do six weeks of rehab work before the surgery, so that he’d have an easier recovery, but the day before he was supposed to start, he came down the stairs and then collapsed into a heap, letting out a sound that can only be described as a scream. It turned out that he had broken his leg, a side effect from the bone cancer that had conquered his body. When we put him to sleep, one of the last things he did before he closed his eyes was to snatch a used tissue out of my wife’s hand, leaving us both laughing and crying at the same time.

I didn’t write much in the next couple of weeks. I’d gotten Hopper as a puppy a few months before I met my wife, and during the days when my wife and daughters were at work and school, I couldn’t get past the quietness of the house. For the first time there was no dog curled up under my desk or lying at the top of the stairs. There was no dog to sigh and rumble to his feet so he could follow me to the kitchen when I got a drink.

Now, nearly two years later, as I’m typing this, our new dog, Turtle, is almost fifteen months old. Full-grown but still a puppy. He’s lying on his side and dreaming, and as he lets out a whimper I reach down to pet him, to say, “good boy, good boy.”

Alexi Zentner’s Touch was selected for the New Face of Fiction program in 2011. Touch will be available wherever books and ebooks are sold on April 12, 2011.