Steven Peck's award-winning article "Two-Dog Dose"

At this year’s Association for Mormon Letters Conference, Steven Peck’s Spring 2014 piece “Two-Dog Dose” won the AML’s Short Fiction Award. Dialogue is pleased to release this article from the premium archives so that anyone who wishes to enjoy this award-winning piece, may do so.
As AML brilliantly summarizes:  “In ‘Two-Dog Dose,’ Steven L. Peck explores the meaning of empathy and loyalty through a wrenching moral dilemma. Lorin and Karl have been friends since their days as roommates at BYU. Now, in their old age, Karl is on the brink of losing himself in the fog of dementia and informs his friend that he’s ‘invoking the pact”—a pact that will require Lorin to decide if the strength of his word and the power of his friendship is enough to endure the horror of helping his best friend die. Through beautiful language and obvious affection for landscape, Peck describes a friendship that has endured over decades, and despite differences of belief. There is pain here in Peck’s unflinching portrayal of a desperate situation: we feel it; we believe it. And, through a beautifully symbolic and cathartic baptism near the story’s end, we emerge changed from having vicariously lived through it. Peck’s ‘Two-Dog Dose‘ represents the very best of Mormon storytelling, and the Association for Mormon Letters is pleased to honor it with the 2014 award for short fiction.”