First published on the internet at: http://www.xiffi.com/index.php?view=article&catid=425%3Aflash-fiction&id=214%3Ainconstant-dog-star&option=com_content&Itemid=77
by Andrew Arnett
From atop my table top, I watch the fluorescent light of the television flicker in the half lit room. The rabbit ears antennae are crossed and Jay Leno is breaking up over the airwaves. How inconstant his jokes are, or at least inconsistent. I’m disappointed with television. It is the final joke, and it fails to amuse me any longer. When the airwaves are shut down at the beginning of ’09, I won’t bother to switch to digital. Let’s just let sleeping dogs lay. Let’s call it a day. It is time we cracked a book anyway. When is the last time I read a book from cover to cover? Not since they invented “Lost”, that’s for sure. God damn those cliff hanger endings. They leave me feeling uneasy, reaching for my bottle of Nyquil. Speaking of which, I do believe I need a refill. I’ve been nursing this cough since allergy season began. The pollen is mighty bad this year.
Sadie is sleeping on the couch. She is the brown pit bull we rescued off of Craig’s list a couple of months ago. She is happy to be alive, but she’s no fan of Jay Leno, that’s for sure. But she certainly likes to go for the walk. “Let’s go girl, we’re going out there, into the town.” She leaps off the couch like a gazelle. She dances around. She pulls the leash down from the wall. “Are you going to the store?” my girlfriend asks me. “Yes I am, dear.” “Good, could you get me a box of Milano cookies, a bar of pepper jack cheese, half a gallon of Silk chocolate soy milk, and one frozen Peppermint Paddy.” “Why, certainly dear.” I would get that woman anything including the moon if, of course, it came pre-packaged in individually wrapped, easy to carry to-go-boxes found exclusively in the dairy section of your local grocers.
We step out unto the streets. Sadie and I walk up Park Avenue. It is a descent part of town, but we nonetheless have to step over a couple of sleeping bums on our midnight perambulations. I have to admonish Sadie for attempting to urinate on one of the bums, regardless of how familiar the smell may be. Somewhere far above us, the dog star Sirius shines down. A crack deal goes down in an ally way at the corner of 34th street but that in no way detracts from the majesty of the night. We arrive at our local grocery store D’Agastinos, and this is where the hard part begins.
It is like a mine field in there, inside the modern grocery store. You have to step carefully, choose your groceries with meticulous care, or whoops, you are dead meat. We make our way down the aisles. The soup cans line the shelves like little tin grenades. All of them are filled with MSG. That stuff will instantly give you a migraine headache, and put you flat out on your back for five hours. And that’s the good part. Long term prognosis is obesity, diabetes, death. Move along then, perhaps to something fresh. The beef is injected with antibiotics, anabolic steroids, and growth hormones. And then of course you have the possibility of mad cow disease, which causes dementia in the human brain, or just good old fashioned e coli contamination. Same things go into the chicken, but there you’re looking at the possibility of salmonella or H5N1 avian flu. Yummy.
Now fish, there’s some good brain food. Indeed, except the high mercury levels can make you real stupid real fast. So then you may consider the farmed fish but then again you’re dealing with industrial levels of antibiotics. Now is a good time to re-affirm your commitment to vegetarianism. But low, check out the pesticides that all the bright green produce is bathed in. If you get something shipped in from a foreign country, like a South American orange, you may be lucky enough to have it laced with DDT. Who checks for this kind of thing anymore anyway? The three employees working for the EPA are usually on vacation. I once ate a mango from Thailand and my throat swelled up like a melon. Perhaps we would all be better with Monsanto’s genetically modified grain. At least that stuff has a patent number on it. On the way out I wanted a pack of gum, but then I considered the aspartame, and the brain legions, and I thought I’d rather not. Something to wet the whistle would be nice like a soda pop but then you have to deal with the sodium bicarbonates which cause a wasting away of the human body premature to its years. I decided to just stick to my Nyquil. You have to go with something you trust, in the long run.
When I got home the girlfriend was already asleep in the other room so the dog and I broke out the Milano cookies and ravaged those. It always amazes me how intelligent and sensitive this dog can be, as if she is in complete understanding of me and, at times, even understands the English language fluently. She looks at me with such knowing eyes. Just at the moment I was thinking these thoughts, Sadie stood up on her hind legs, just like a person would do, and then asked me politely in perfect English “could you be so kind as to pass me another Milano cookie Andrew, I find these delicacies perfectly irresistible.” I was about to absent mindedly just hand a cookie over when I began choking, aghast at the sheer absurdity of being confronted by a talking dog, in my own home no less. “Well hell no,” I stammered “I can’t do that, you’re a . . . you’re a . . . talking dog for Christ sakes.” “Now, now Andrew” she said “surely you can’t be that surprised, after all, you are well aware that all dogs lead a far more enlightened life than the average human being. We are much more humble, nurturing and eco-friendly than the vast majority of your species. The fact that we don’t communicate directly to humans is due to the lack of comprehension on the humans part. We are only having this conversation Andrew, because you have proven to be an enlightened member of your kind.” Well, it’s true that dogs don’t say much but when they do open up, it’s really hard to shut them up. Sadie proceeded to tell me the long history of dogs and how they in fact migrated on space ships from the constellation of Sirius some million years ago. After close to an hour of dialogue my girlfriend emerged from her room. “Are you talking to somebody,” she asked wearily. “Uh, no dear, just watching the TV.” Sadie curled up on the coach like a good dog, looked at me with a knowing wink, and didn’t say another word. Well, she wouldn’t believe me if I told her anyway.
end.
