Puppy love

I was on vacation in a department store called Woolco.  In the hardware section I found several puppies for sale.  The owners sat bent up inside the tiny cages offering their puppies through the open door to passers-by to try out.

I cuddled with a tiny tortoiseshell puppy; it had a miniature husky face and soft triangular ears.  After returning the puppy to its owner-cage I resumed shopping.  But I could not get the puppy out of my head.  I stalked the hardware aisle twice more, trying to resemble someone innocently shopping for light bulbs or screw drivers.  My heart soared every time I was able to verify that my puppy was still there.

After shopping I was due at a barbecue .  Inevitably I turned every conversation into a story about the puppy.  The puppy was so cute.  The puppy's fur was soft.  Did they want to see a creeper snapshot I'd stolen of the puppy when the owner wasn't looking?

Finally two of my friends insisted that I either shut up or show them the puppy.  We drove to the store.  I wasn't sure which floor I had been on when I first found the puppies; I scoured the first floor with no luck so we went up a flight of stairs.  We walked every puppy-less aisle, then returned to the stairs.  They were dotted with orange traffic cones so we had to swing and hop our way back down to the first floor.  No success; swing hop back to the second floor.  Search for puppies.  Still nothing.

I started to panic.  I couldn't find the puppies.  Finally I found two hardware displays that had flanked the puppy cages.  All sign of the puppies were gone.  I burst into tears.  My friends said I was foolish and that clearly this was a sign that I was not ready for a dog.

Shipping containers and med students

I park my van on a narrow gravel driveway next to Repurposes, a condo complex made of shipping containers.  My friend Craig comes out of the first house and waves me in.  "I'll make tea," he says, disappearing inside, while I wrangle my two cats out the side door of the van and in through his front door.

Craig starts the kettle and then opens the back door.  Both cats shoot through before I can say anything.

"They are indoor only," I begin, but Craig interrupts me, reassures me that his is a completely fenced yard.  He points through a small porthole to a skinny strip of grass with tall fences on both sides.  But the fence stops short of the ground and as we watch, both cats wriggle under it easily.

"Oh.  Sorry," says Craig.

I rush to open the back fence gate.  My fluffy orange cat is at the bottom of  a cliff; I have no idea where the other one is.  I call and he climbs towards my voice.  The cliff begins as a shallow slope at the bottom but the incline is negative by the top so that it is a mild overhang.  I have to close my eyes as the cat negotiates his way back; it's too nerve-wracking to watch.  I scoop him up at the top, heart pounding, eyes still shut, and shut the gate.  I stroke him and he feels sleek.  Opening my eyes I realize this is a short-haired black cat.

I leave Craig's.  It's darker now.  I've parked my van much farther away than I thought.  The neighbourhood seems much more urban.

I walk under a freeway underpass and a medical student in scrubs steps drunkenly from the passenger seat of a parked rusting car.  He's frantically emptying a hat onto the ground and somehow I know to hold my breath even before feces begin raining from it.  He takes a few steps then vomits copiously on the ground from the stench. 

I pass a sleeping bag with two bodies sleeping head to toe.  The bag is unzipped in the middle, so the heads at each end are covered but two mirror imaged white naked pelvises are exposed.  I wake exhausted, scared, and sad.