Dog Inches

 Writing with a borrowed pen is one thing but when watched by its beady owner to ensure you’d not run out with it, then the panic sets in. The man was one such pen-owner who thought a cheap chewed biro was worth preserving even at the cost of a potential friendship.

“What you writing?” he posed on the long end of silence.

I stared at his drooling features; he couldn’t help the way he looked but – “goddam it – there are such things as hankies,” I said to him, before answering his question: “Well, if you must know, I’m writing about you.”

“Me?”

“Better than coffins and creams,” I laughed. That was an odd expression which I often used when filling in the embarrassing gaps of otherwise already embarrassing muti-tiered sandwiches of words that some claim as conversation. “Oodles of pancakes laced with molasses,” I added, trying to freshen up the old usages.

The man, obviously, looked half-quizzical. His dog was inches away, tethered by a paw to his toe. The dog was salivating over a chewed bone, waiting for a proper titbit of dinner. It’d get none from me. 

“Pen OK?” he queried. The man, not the dog

“A bit blotchy.”

The dog stirred as it decided snoozing was better than snivelling. I sensed its dream.

There was a moonlit graveyard and the tombstones were inching from the ground as creatures came up through the corpses then through the upper rind of grassy ground. I snuffled in a nearby tussock hoping for a titbit from the dead. Better than chicken runs even when the moon had gone and wind-driven rain replaced it — and widespread yellow light turned to soaking spray. I tried to tug a morsel of blind member, only to find it riddled with whatever had claimed it from beneath. I spat out ribbons of what looked like drivel … or drizzle.

Woke from the dog’s dream. Too much wordplay there for a dog to wield, no doubt, upon surveying the scribble still dribbling from the nib. It spluttered onto the page in great black blots of India ink, rather as a fountain pen would perform rather than a ballpoint. A false filling to make the stale words palatable.

The dog stared at me dolefully from the floor. He’d always wondered how pens worked in automatic writing. Each wag a word. Must be haunted. The pen a worried bone. The false nib tentatively nibbled, then eschewed. You see, the canine’s teeth had long since eaten the whole of the empty-headed man, in preference to any part of me, in case it accidentally swallowed the brain, thus ending a dog’s life too soon.