Choose Your Dose!
Filling in for The Fiction Dealer (with permission)
Hello all,
I asked
if I could fill in for him sometime this week. I know he’s trying to focus on his novel, and I’ve been trying to get my writing back on track. I thought that contributing a Fiction Dealer style prompt would be a great move, and Miguel liked the idea, so I wrote a short story based on the prompt Bark and then overdosed massively.Now I’m going to tag as many Fiction Dealer regulars as I can find in a half hour or so, but do please tag every single person I miss. I’ll be posting the link in Notes too, if you prefer to post your story there.
Choose your dose!
80mg of Bark
Or…
Overdose on Much Ado About Nothing
As always, do whatever you are inspired to do!
Now for my entry…
The Great War of Axel
Ava closed her eyes and tried to focus on the delicious holiday alchemy in her mouth. She chewed slowly and savored it, letting those familiar cocoa peppermint notes coat her tongue and fill her sinuses with love. “Oh yyaaaa, so good.”
It was almost like December was making a triumphant return to save her, but just when the rescue was about to commence someone threw open the office door and let the incessant, spirit murdering modern moment hit her at full volume. She huffed and threw the empty Ghirardelli wrapper in the little trash can next to her manager’s desk. Then, as if she needed one more petty injury, she noticed a fresh chip in her Christmas green nail polish. She pouted and took note… Twas no longer the season.
“Oh my god,” Dany said, finally shutting the door behind her. “I’m so confused. I love dogs so so much, but I’m so upset right now. I can’t even hear myself think out there, it’s like, amplifying off the ceiling or something. Why won’t they make him stop?”
Ava palmed her forehead gently and surveyed the source of the problem, an older married couple waiting with their black lab between the two gated alcoves where all the grooming and dog washing took place. Their exact destination was ambiguous, as was the reason for their dog’s extreme vocals.
Several customers were already scattering, though the man in the dog wash seemed unconcerned. Annoyingly, all of Ava’s coworkers had vanished from the scene, except for Kira, who was trapped at the grooming table with an increasingly anxious poodle. That was the answer, Ava decided. Kira was the closest, and she would just have to think of something. Dany seemed to agree.
Responding to some sort pet store telepathy, Kira looked up from the poodle, spotted her coworkers watching her from the office in their green polos, and shrugged hopelessly. Apparently she had already tried.
In a fit of exasperation, Dany let out her full glut of natural brown curls and remade her pony tail. “What should we do?”
What could anyone do? Ava had no clue. The couple obviously didn’t want their dog to stop barking, and clearly their eardrums had developed an immunity to the impressive, reverberating bellows of their sweet fur baby.
Visceral shock waves powered through the open door again as Seth stumbled in and started flailing his skinny white teenager arms around. He was holding a seven ounce container of Tetra Tropical Color Flakes. “Do those two have a grooming appointment or are they just mad at the guy in the dog wash!?”
Ava absently picked at her nail polish while she decided. “I think it’s Option B.” She peered into the dog wash and watched as the young bearded man began rinsing the larger of his dogs. Was that thing a husky mixed with a saint bernard? Ava crunched the essential data and mumbled, “It’ll take him forever to dry that dog.”
There was a cracking sound followed by a tiny little pop, and fish food spilled out of Seth’s hand. The poor kid was losing it already. Customer service was certainly not going to be his thing today. “See,” he grumbled. “This is exactly what my grandpa says all the time. Nobody knows how to act anymore!”
Ava glanced at Dany long enough to witness the crippling social anxiety of their entire generation exemplified perfectly by two long wet streams running down two light brown cheeks. It was a bit much.
“Okay,” Ava said. “I guess I can try.”
Both Dany and Seth lightened significantly, and they looked at Ava like she was shooting rizz straight out of her eyeballs, like she was some kind blond nerd goddess with severe sun allergies. She couldn’t let them down now, so she put on her most professional smile and made for the door.
“Ava, take these!” Dany shouted as thunderous explosions assaulted their eardrums again.
Ava caught the bag of freeze dried chicken cubes and tried to nod heroically. “I got this,” she told them.
“What?” Dany asked.
Seth’s eyes narrowed confusedly. “Yea we know. We saw you catch it.”
Ava’s smile nearly fizzled away as she shut the door, but she gave them a thumb up anyway. She watched the dog washer as she walked, hoping to see some sign of reliable maturity in his eyes, but he was still busy rinsing his big adorable mutt and had yet to realize that he was the subject of the black lab’s ballad, so she couldn’t guess how he would react.
Finally Ava arrived at the dog’s side, and she practically screamed at his humans. “Can I give him some treats!?”
The older couple acknowledged her, but they looked confused. “What’s that?” the husband asked. He was a decently tall man with the easy smile and full gray mane of a recently retired boomer. His nice black pullover jacket bore the logo of some company Ava didn’t recognize.
Ava kept smiling and tried again. “Can I give him a treat?!”
“Oh sure!” the wife agreed happily. “Did you hear that, Axel? You’re such a good boy! Give him as many as you want!”
Ava pulled the bag open, and a moment of pure bliss ensued as Axel’s wet nostrils captured a wiff of chicken that took command of his whole brain, including the part responsible for his voice.
“Thanks,” the husband said, smiling at Axel’s feasting face.
“Yea, thanks,” the wife added as she slid her purse strap farther up her puff jacketed shoulder.
Ava let Axel slobber up another handful of chicken cubes and nodded at the dog wash gate. “You can go in. There’s three more tubs, so you don’t have to wait out here.”
The husband pointed at the small white puffball of a dog sniffing around inside the dog wash area. There was just enough judgment in his tone to belie his smile. “Well he has one running around loose in there.”
With Axel quietly slurping away instead of barking, the man in the dog wash heard everything and finally turned his attention beyond the gate.
Ava pounced on the moment and raised her voice politely, but enough so the dog washer would hear her clearly. “Well I’m sure if you ask him he can keep his dogs out of the way for you.”
The older couple didn’t respond, and before Ava realized that her supply of chicken had been eaten up, Axel resumed his symphony for the ages.
At that very same moment the man in the dog wash realized what had happened and moved to corral his loose puffball. Ava smiled at him, and as he drew closer she noticed the mature gray in his beard and decided that he was to be the true hero of this moment. She envisioned the two grown up men reaching a solid compromise, and she beamed proudly at them before the inevitable deal was sealed and done. But as the younger of the two men reached for his little dog’s collar he glanced up with apologetic eyes that turned instantly to stone after meeting the eyes of the gray haired boomer.
Ava’s heart nearly stopped as their masculine energies clashed. Were they angry? Would they fight? She took a step back and tried to think of something to say. Her lips even parted in preparation, but the two men were locked onto each other like two tomcats in a cage, and decades of nonverbal animosity passed between them.
The older stood calmly with a satisfied expression on his face as Axel did the dirty work for him. How dare you. How dare you not notice. How dare you not be prepared for my arrival. How dare you not consider the consequences of letting your dog run loose in the dog wash area. Your generation is what’s wrong with everything, it’s all your fault. Hear my champion’s roar and suffer. Suffer for the crimes of your entire snowflake generation. Let this be the one lesson you finally learn, not that it matters now. I can’t believe you still wear your baseball hat backwards, we used to stuff guys like you in their lockers. You’re just like my son who won’t call his mother.
The younger, having understood every unspoken word, nodded coldly. Go ahead and tear it all down old man, I’ll only laugh at the rubble. Rage at the universe that refused to revolve eternally around you, I’ll only embrace the black hole that sucks us all in. Render your impotent judgment and see if I care. Blame the future on me. Nothing matters anymore anyway. And by the way, the hat was only backwards while I washed my dogs, so sorry coach. You know what? Let’s tear it all down together you bastard. You’re just like my asshole father. Then he turned his back and left his little puffball dog to run loose while he finished rinsing and drying the big one.
Ava sought sympathy from Axel’s dogmom but found none, so she slouched, offered a sympathetic frown to Kira and her poodle client, and made for the sanctuary of the office while two other customers walked out shaking their heads.
“What happened?” Dany and Seth asked at the same time.
“The adults are fighting,” Ava told them, forming air quotes around the word adults.
Dany shook her head in dismay. “Wait. What? About what? I don’t… We just lost two customers!”
Ava explained it while she dug another Peppermint Bark out of the drawer marked Human Treats. “It isn’t even about the dogs anymore, and they don’t care if they’re screwing us or the other customers, because they just want to win.”
Dany wiped her cheeks. “But… Win what?”
“Skibidi,” Seth proclaimed after a long sigh.
Ava still had no idea what that word meant. She was about to ask, but Seth didn’t look like Seth anymore. His whole body had become totally relaxed, and he was nodding along to the rhythm of whatever epiphany had come to him. Then he just walked out of the office laughing and didn’t come back.
Dany left a few seconds later, but she didn’t follow Seth’s path toward the stock room, which would have offered her a quiet repose. Instead she made straight for Axel with an extra large rawhide roll in her hand. Ava watched in awe as her overwhelmed friend became a butterfly before her very eyes. Gestures were made, and then Axel was laying on the floor gnawing on the roll.
Ava laughed and flexed at Dany when she looked into the office for approval. Dany smiled and flexed back.
Bark (80)
Marco looked like freshly mined limestone crammed into an Armani tracksuit. A small piano ensconced in spandex blend. By appearances predesigned for his perhaps inevitable profession of inflicting pain. His voice however did not match the rest of the package. Apparently unaware of this disconnect, the earnest Marco would issue stern pre-beating warnings in his soft breathy contralto, eliciting mocking grins from his soon to be victims, who would learn, too late, that his bite was worse than his bark.
John had just gotten to sleep, when the dog barked: Piercingly, insistently, LOUDLY.
John yelled, "Shut up!" The dog was quiet.
Within minutes, the dog barked again: Boisterously, stridently, uproariously.
John bellowed, "SHUT UP!" The dog was quiet.
Again, the dog barked: Mightily, resoundingly, thunderously.
John opened his bedroom door and threw a workboot in the general direction of the commotion. The dog was quiet.
The dog quietly wagged his tail as the burglar patted his head, murmuring, "GOOD boy."