Dog!

A story told in six sentences


by Joseph Lupoli


And there I was, minding my own business, strolling to work along a narrow dirt trail in the middle of a large barren field on a suffocatingly humid and eerily quiet morning, when I first heard the angry barking. 


The racket was coming from an empty, dilapidated house about fifty yards away. Well this fucking sucks, I thought, as the biggest and meanest and most muscular Doberman Pincher I ever saw in my life was making a fast beeline right toward me. 


That meant I had about four seconds to forget about why this psychotic wildebeest on steroids wanted to eat me in the first place, and I instead concentrated on its gnashing shark fangs and its cold frenzied eyes glued to my throat, while it sprinted at me with extreme prejudice like Secretariat in a bad mood careening down the backstretch thirty lengths ahead of the field at Churchill Downs. 


I wasn't willing to risk timing a low roundhouse kick to the Doberman's prehistoric head because if I missed, my pivot leg would be instantly devoured. 


So with zero seconds left on the clock, I knelt down really low, stared straight at the ground, and then divine intervention took over, because for some unfathomable reason, Jaws suddenly screeched to a halt and began licking my face and hands while furiously wagging her little nub of a tail.