Short excerpt from a fictional short story I’m working on. Enjoy!
The dog named Kitty was Anise’s idea, naturally. She had been requesting a furry companion daily by then, and who was Louis to deny his dying wife the joy of a man’s best friend? Louis himself had never been a dog person, has never been any kind of animal person, but Anise brought him along to the shelter anyway.
When Louis had first laid eyes on the creature, his honest to God first thought was: Animal shelters allow you to adopt rats now?
Anise preferred to describe him as “poodle adjacent.” No employee or volunteer knew what kind of mix he was, they just deemed him a supermutt. He was also a runt, weighing in at just five pounds. His fur was cream colored (the color of curdled milk, Louis thought; the color of fluffy clouds, Anise proclaimed), his teeth had long fallen out, resulting in his dry tongue hanging out the side at all times, and his left eye was a dark stormcloud of cataracts. He was somewhere between 7 and 10 years old, a senior citizen, and when the shelter told Anise his name was Kitty, she said, “I’ll take him immediately.”
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And now, please enjoy these pictures of my childhood pup and best friend, Muggsy, who lived to the ripe old age of 17. If this isn’t proof that fiction is stolen from real life, I don’t know what is. 🙂
Paige Gardner 