Tag: Pet Prose

“He worked for a branch of government security so secret sometimes even he wasn’t sure where it fit into the chain, and he’d been an agent for thirteen years. Internally, they were known as Wolf Pack, though an agent usually worked in the field as a Lone Wolf, making contact with local enforcement agencies as directed. On each mission, an agent was tagged with a name from the NATO alphabet combined with the mission location.

This time, he was Hotel Cairo. It sounded exotic, but he was actually stuck in Cairo, Illinois, a once-thriving town that now was underpopulated, undereducated, and underserviced. Worse, he had a partner, November Cairo, and he preferred working alone. At least she wasn’t inclined to chatter, but she had a way of leveling a stare at him that made him feel almost like he didn’t have more than a decade of experience or that he wasn’t a few years older than she was.

For three days, they’d had to stretch the bounds of credibility by pretending to be tourists in a place where he felt sure few vacationers came. It had been her idea to bring a couple of digital cameras along and give one to him.

‘Photographers are usually ecstatic over places most people wouldn’t spit on,’ she said drily on their first day out. ‘A camera gives you a good reason to size up things, stare at them.’

‘Yeah, right, I know that,’ he’d answered. ‘Sometimes a camera also catches something the human eye doesn’t register.’

‘Maybe not yours,’ she said.

That had pretty much set the tone from the outset, and it hadn’t gotten better. Now they were stuck at midnight watching a road that no one traveled, waiting for anything that looked suspicious. They’d seen nothing, not even an appearance by a deer or raccoon.

‘You know,’ November said, breaking a near two-hour silence, ‘there’s almost zero possibility of the motorcade coming through here anytime in the next three days.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, staring through the windshield at nothing. ‘It’s the assignment.’

‘How long has it been since you’ve done anything…’ she trailed off. When he remained silent, she finally continued, ‘…that you considered really relevant? Do you ever think we’re just some lawmaker’s pet project with no real mission or bearing on national security? Or even an experiment in how long someone who thinks they’re relevant will continue to do a job with no real purpose or function?’

‘Nope,’ he said. He’d liked her better when she was quiet.

‘What’s your name? Where do you come from? Who are you?’

‘Maybe this is an experiment, and they want to see how long I can resist your questions. Hotel Cairo, Wolf Pack, United States of America.’

He heard the sound that meant she was blowing her bangs out of her eyes, then she said, ‘I’m easy.’

He was sure she couldn’t see his perplexed expression as he turned his head toward her. Was this some kind of seduction?

‘That’s my name. EZ, the letters. Not easy, the word. And before you ask, the initials don’t stand for anything. My parents named me EZ because my mother was in labor about ten minutes before I made a graceful and nearly pain-free entrance into the world.’

‘I guess they didn’t consider the ramifications the name might have on a teenage girl?’

‘I survived,’ she said. ‘I grew up in South Carolina, graduated from a military academy then Boston College. Did some time in the Bureau and was moved to Wolf Pack.’

He was quiet a few minutes and finally said, ‘Code.’

‘No, it’s all true–’

‘It’s my name. Code. Old family surname that my parents made my first name.’

‘I guess they didn’t consider the ramifications the name might have on a future special agent of the United States of America?’

‘I’ve survived so far,’ he said.

Even in the dark, he was sure her smile mirrored his.”

From Patrick’s suspense novel of espionage Code in Cairo.

I take photos. I write. My volunteer job is taking photos of rescued dogs and cats transported by the rescue group whose records I manage. Since working and volunteering don’t leave me a lot of time to write, I’m spending 2017 borrowing from what these dogs and cats are writing. They said it’s okay.

Patrick named his characters in honor of donors to my Saving Pets fundraiser. Thank you!

“It was October of my senior year in high school when my grandpa died. I already wasn’t having a good year and taking a road trip with my parents and my kid sister to rural South Dakota–isn’t all of South Dakota rural?–was not my preferred method of ditching a week of school. Plus I’d loved my grandpa. We didn’t get to see him a lot, but he had a knack for making a kid feel like what he said and thought mattered.

The rest of the family lived closer than us, so they’d made it to his old farmhouse a day or two before we did. It was easy to see that most everybody had reached a point where they’d eaten and drunk too much and gotten all their nostalgia out of the way. They were ready to rehash old battles, argue over who should get what stuff, and generally be jerks. Nobody was talking about Grandpa.

After a couple of hours of listening to them and eating yet another scoop of another casserole brought by basically the entire population of South Dakota, I slipped into Grandpa’s room, sat on his bed–way too soft–and stared at the floor for a while. I was considering taking a nap when I noticed his old work boots tucked under his dresser. They couldn’t possibly be the same ones he’d worn when I was a kid, but they looked the same. They reminded me of times when he and I walked around the property before he’d gotten too old to farm and sold most of it off. Or when we’d slosh through the muddy ground that led to the pond where he taught me to fish. I thought of rides on the tractor, feeding the cows, and trying to make the mules let me ride them–they never did. I thought of the year he bought goats and the goats decided they wanted to live in the house. His goat stories had made my sister and me laugh so hard she’d peed her pants, but Grandpa just did some laundry and kept her secret.

I slid out of my Chucks and stuffed them into the oversized pockets of my army surplus field jacket that my mother hated. Then I slipped into Grandpa’s boots, laced them up, and stood. They were a perfect fit. I was pretty sure nobody was going to notice the battered old boots as long as I didn’t call attention to them, but I still tried to make myself invisible as I walked through the scattered groups of quarrelsome family members and outside to our car, where I hid my sneakers under the driver’s seat.

I turned to go back inside and almost stumbled when my feet suddenly decided to take a sharp left. I shook my head and again tried to turn toward the house, but my feet were not cooperating.

Or maybe it wasn’t my feet. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I considered that Grandpa’s boots just might have their own plan for where I was going next.”

From Mr. Cookie’s work in progress These Boots. 

I take photos. I write. My volunteer job is taking photos of rescued dogs and cats transported by the rescue group whose records I manage. Since working and volunteering don’t leave me a lot of time to write, I’m spending 2017 borrowing from what these dogs and cats are writing. They said it’s okay.

“I knew I wasn’t going anywhere that New Year’s Eve when I woke up with chills and a strong desire to borrow my girlfriend’s neti pot, which is about the grossest inclination I’ve ever had and after years of teasing her so mercilessly about it, only my sense that death was imminent could have prompted it.

‘Yep,’ Ceecee said, shaking the thermometer, ‘you have a fever.’

‘What do you think is wrong? The flu? Swine flu? Ebola? West Nile virus? What’s that other one everybody was supposed to get in South America? Zika? We ate at Bogotá three days ago. How do we know someone in the kitchen isn’t a carrier?’

‘Because there are no mosquitos in Kansas in December. What you have is a man cold. You’ll be okay.’

‘You’re not a doctor.’

‘Fine. I’ll call Patrick. Maybe he can give you a shot of something.’

I closed my eyes and willed myself not to remind her I was deathly afraid of shots. From there, my fevered brain was off and running. I was so afraid of shots that I’d never been shot through the heart. Had a double shot of my baby’s love. Then again, my baby never shot me down (bang bang). I never shot the sheriff or the deputy. Never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Never hit anybody with my best shot. I was not a hot shot, a long shot, or a big shot.

Why the hell were there so many popular songs about shots? And why did we have a thermometer with mercury in it instead of one of those digital kind? Maybe I had mercury poisoning.”

From Herbie’s short story Fever Dreams. 

I take photos. I write. My volunteer job is taking photos of rescued dogs and cats transported by the rescue group whose records I manage. Since working and volunteering don’t leave me a lot of time to write, I’m spending 2017 borrowing from what these dogs and cats are writing. They said it’s okay.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that no beverage tastes good after one has just brushed one’s teeth.”

From Magritte’s article “Crested.” 

 

I take photos. I write. My volunteer job is taking photos of rescued dogs and cats transported by the rescue group whose records I manage. Since working and volunteering don’t leave me a lot of time to write, I’m spending 2017 borrowing from what these dogs and cats are writing. They said it’s okay.

“She knew exactly when and how her love of cows began. Though her house and collection had been featured many times through the years on local news shows or in newspaper Lifestyle sections when they ran low on human interest stories, she’d never shared that information publicly.

She smiled when the cameras invaded her home to document the thousands of cow figures and toys in her collection. The children’s books featuring cows. Cow art that spilled from her walls to the metal structures in her garden. Cow pillows and stuffed cows, cow sheets and cow salt and pepper shakers. Cow dishes, cow soap dispensers, the cow shower curtains in both bathrooms.

She knew that they were poking fun at her (once, she’d even called it ‘cow poking’ in an interview, which led to a discussion of whether or not cow tipping was a real thing). She’d heard all the jokes from her friends. Her family worried that she was a hoarder. Her husband’s only complaint was that he’d given up eating meat for her.

But whether they laughed or rolled their eyes over her cows, no one knew how it began. They didn’t know about the flooding in the town where she’d lived when she was six. They didn’t see a girl standing at the edge of her backyard in the suburban neighborhood of cheaply constructed houses, watching the swollen creek rush by below her. No one but her saw the cow who’d been swept into the torrent and drowned. She floated with bits of debris made of small tree limbs, grasses, and flowers clinging to her, as if nature were providing a funeral float on this small sea turned red by churned up Georgia clay.

For that all too brief passing, her soul met the cow’s soul–for she didn’t doubt then and never doubted afterward that animals have souls–and every image, totem, and bibelot since had been an homage to a single, lost cow.”

From Skye’s story “Sacred Cow.” 

I take photos. I write. My volunteer job is taking photos of rescued dogs and cats transported by the rescue group whose records I manage. Since working and volunteering don’t leave me a lot of time to write, I’m spending 2017 borrowing from what these dogs and cats are writing. They said it’s okay.