The Tintinnabulation Of Those Little Doggy Bells

This is my mother’s dog, Koshi:

I’d say Koshi is five pounds soaking wet, but as it turns out she’s six pounds.  In any case, Koshi is the least harmful dog in the history of canines.  I’m pretty sure that if I laid limp on the floor completely naked, Koshi still could not seriously injure me.
But at night she becomes a terror.
See, at night my mother’s house is very dark.  We sleep on the far side, in a bedroom around a corner, where there is a bathroom outside.  And when you rise to pee in the middle of the night, Koshi – ever-excitable – hears the noise and comes to investigate.
There is something fucking terrifying about hearing her little doggy-tags, in the stygian stillness of the night, approaching you, growing closer.  It’s the blind knowledge that something is stalking you, growing louder, coming around a corner.  I thought I was a fool for being scared and ducking into the bathroom before she arrived… but as it turned out, Gini was afraid, too.
We know, in daylight, that Koshi is a little fuzzer-pup, harmless as a fruit fly.  But when darkness settles, and those caveman instincts set in, and we’re dressed in flimsy pajamas half-naked, we know that something is coming towards us and yet we’re not entirely sure what it is.  The logical brain tells us it’s a dog; the animal brain tells us to run.  So we duck into the bathroom and slam the door.
The night changes things.  All those years of civilization get stripped away and suddenly you’re running in the night. From a dog no bigger than a football.