When I was approaching my teenage years, my family got a dog. We all put our names into a hat to decide who would get the esteemed job of naming our baby black fluff ball (she was a Peki-Pom back before designer breeds became all the rage). My kid sister, abnormally obsessed with Victor Hugo's Les Miserables at such a young age, won the round and christened our new pet with the name Cosette. It wasn't long before we shortened it to Cozy, which was much more apropos for our four legged little buddy.
Cozy was a licker, and a lover, and a playful little animal. She was also a barker, sometimes a racist, and she developed a lethal brand of halitosis in her latter years. But my family loved her like family, like some people tend to do, like the kind of people that non-dog-lovers roll their eyes at and deem “strange”.
Every once in awhile, something would come over Cozy and she would start to shake or shiver uncontrollably. It was the weirdest thing, especially because it would almost always occur after she had spotted a fly on the window. Her snout would bounce back and forth, following the darting fly as it taunted her (but not really, it just wanted to get back outside). And then, all of a sudden, Cozy would remain in the same position, shaking, staring, exhibiting abnormal behavior. Sometimes she would meander over to one of us, shaking, looking to us for help while at the same time staring out into the corner of nothing. I don't remember who discovered it, or who thought to prescribe it, but there was one trick that could “snap” Cozy out of this stare. One of us would grab her, another would grab the car keys, and we would take her out to the car on the driveway, set her on our lap, then flip on the windshield wipers. Now, something you should know is that this little dog hated the windshield wipers with a passion unmatched by any other wiper hater. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought she'd been abused by windshield wipers as a puppy. Inevitably, as soon as the wipers started slashing their back and forth slash, Cozy would erupt into a fit of ferocious barking, thereby snapping herself out of her shaky reverie. We later learned that these episodes were most likely petit mal seizures, and while our prescription was not the orthodox treatment for seizures, it was at least effective.
And so the little girl sits on the corner of her bed, shivering a tiny bit, digging her fingernails into the somewhat dry palms of her hand, trying to remember the trick. Surely there is a trick, a take her outside and flip on the ol' windshield wipers trick, to snap her out of this unpleasant and hard to describe state.