KEN FOSTER is the author of The Kind I'm Likely to Get, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and editor of The KGB Bar Reader, the anthology Harper's called, "one of the strongest collections of new writing available." He has written for The New York Times Book Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, McSweeney's, and others. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Sewanee Writers Conference, Foster lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his two dogs.

Coco ate: popcorn, hair pomade, dirty kitty litter, Twinkies, red Chanel lip stick, used tea bags, spaghetti, sandalwood soap, Cheerios, orange peels, ham, cream cheese, though, oddly, never leather or shoes. His lunges for food came to seem like a performance. Punk Rock: Coco growling and grabbing a bagel in his teeth even as I shouted, "No!" Comic: Coco carrying a nail file in his mouth for blocks, refusing to accept the fact that it was tasteless. Existential: the long face and the tail lowered because the one lousy piece of stale bread had been beyond the reach of his leash.
We fed Coco what he needed to stay healthy, but he wanted more. There is something to be said for a vigorous and not too discriminating appetite. He wanted danger, sweetness, blood, strangeness, adventure, salt. Who could blame him? I came to see that part of the pleasure of having a dog is the empathic part, recognizing those sensitivities that we usually think of as human, but another pleasure is in a dog's beastliness. A dog acts like a dog, and I'll admit that I took a vicarious pleasure in watching Coco get the fish skin out of the restaurant's garbage. He was so happy with himself, his tail wagging, devoutly licking and savoring the luminous skin between his paws.