This story appears in my collection The Potato Farm. How does one go about painting a cockatrice, anyway? Here’s how it begins:

PAINTING THE COCKATRICE

I was working on a painting of a cockatrice, and was faced with a dilemma. Its gaze is lethal, which meant that if I painted it well, I would die. I had to admit, reluctantly, that it might be a poor subject for a painting.

I set down my brush and studied the canvas. The creature stared out at me, its baleful eye, meticulously rendered in Cadmium yellow, contrasting boldly with the scarlet comb and wattles. Its neck led down to a squat body and thrashing tail, their scales a mottled green. Its plumed legs ended in muscular feet, the left one raised, its sharp talons menacing the viewer. The anatomy was persuasive, the modeling effective, the brushwork, frankly, rather deft. But when I looked the animal in the eye, I didn’t die. I had failed.

I turned away from the easel and sank my head into my hands.

Somewhere a dog barked.

I sat up and listened. I’d read that sentence in hundreds of novels. In fact, it showed up in four I’d read in the past month: Buck Scarlatti’s searing indictment of humanity Your Values Are Disgusting, Dimity Etheridge’s farcical Pickles in the Pantry, Miff Derrick’s taut thriller Murder Hits the Big Time, and Georgia Crumit’s bucolic Fumigate the Henhouse. In each of these very different fictions, a dog, unidentified and presumably distant, broke the imaginary silence. I paid little attention to it. At best it set a mood; at worst it just inflated the word count.

But now I heard it myself, and became curious.