One Poem for Thursday June 20 2024 A Tale of Two Dogs A Prose Poem Jill
jill stockinger
A Tale of Two Dogs by Jill Stockinger
There was a German Shepherd named Bob who lived in a house nearby. One day, he
left that house and moved into my yard. I don’t know why he did that. My yard was
nothing special. In fact, it was in bad shape compared to the green manicured lawns
of most of my neighbors. My lawn had some yellow grass, large brown spots where
the grass had given up, and weeds that grew surprisingly well, despite the heat and
lack of water. We were in a drought; I was doing my part by not watering the lawn.
To be honest, I’d never watered the lawn. I would race up the broken wood steps
that led to the front porch, past the handrail that was in the process of, but never
quite finished with, the act of falling off, and scurry inside and go for a soft landing
on the sagging couch that was an indeterminate brownish, maybe once-red, color,
but the baby poop and cat pee and years of hard living (of the people using it, not
the couch itself) had taken a toll on it. I could tell it was poop and pee from the
lingering smells. The couch had widespread stains; most of them predated my
relationship with the couch.
Then Bob deserted the yard and started living on the small rotting porch and then once,
when I opened the door, he charged in like a maniac ready to fight the battle of his life
and lay on the floor and started sobbing. So I started sobbing too and next thing you
know, we were best buddies, drinking beer together and sharing sad stories about
missed opportunities and lost loves. But then he bit me, and I asked him why and he
couldn't explain, and then he grabbed me, and I kicked him hard. He went limp and I
threw him in the bathtub and filled the tub with lukewarm water. There were hundreds
of fleas on him, and they jumped off him and started biting me all over and I started
howling, and I turned into a dog and he became a person, and he said, “That’s OK, I’ll
take care of you, John,” and he put flea powder on both of us for a month every day. All
the fleas finally died and he used my ID and got a job as an aid to a veterinarian.
Because he was using my ID, he became known as John, and he called me Bob. This didn’t
bother me at all, though I mused if I was still a person, it probably would have bothered me
a great deal. But he made more money than I ever had, and he fed me chuck steak and let
me run around free, and I discovered I could have a lot more fun as a dog than I ever had
as a person. I became quite friendly (if you know what I mean) with Cinnamon, the Labrador
next door and Fifi, the Poodle down the street, and even the mutt whose name I never did
catch, who was owned by a teen somewhere nearby. Every day provided a cornucopia of
astonishing sensory and emotional experiences. Life was good.
Marian Kile
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