GOOD DOG, BAD NEWS

A dog who desires egress bats a bell with his paw. It is hanging. It sounds. A human stands to let him out. But the dog has not waited. The dog has lifted a leg on a newspaper. “All the time I have spent training you,” says the human. “All the promises you made me.” The dog looks up, bewildered. Promises? The dog sleeps in the same place every night. The dog eats the food given him. These are promises kept on both sides. The dog trots outside into the warm night, does his business again, chases a rabbit and then a lizard. He digs by a fencepost. He makes a mental map of the scents scattered around the yard. The human calls the dog to come back in. The dog finds a patch of lawn in the calm center of the outdoors and raises up his head to look at the silhouettes of the trees as they melt into the darkening sky. The dog trots inside, passing the newspaper, whose largest headline tells of a meeting between two world leaders that has gone poorly, and which has as a result increased hostilities, a circumstance that has some geopolitical observers anxious, though they are not nearly anxious enough given what will happen in the coming months, angry words, then angrier ones, then sanctions, then espionage, then conditions proposed by one side and rejected by the other, then an ultimatum, then a failure to respect that ultimatum, then an attack, then a proportionate response, then an amplification of aggressions, then a weapon threatened, then an insult, then a weapon used, then a plea for a reversal of the course that has been set, for the die that has been cast, a plea delivered in a tone so calm that the desperation beneath that calm is evident, then a larger weapon used, in error, but irreversibly, and what difference does it make any longer, and at that point there is only increasingly faint hope and a correspondingly rapid draining of that hope, the planet’s heartbeat both accelerating and weakening, until the patch of lawn on which the dog once stood is scorched, and no one can any longer enter the house, and everything has egressed, and promises can no longer be kept. No headline records that development. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas