loud dog

[Challenge: at my request, Marc wrote down five random words, which I had to use in a short story. One of the words had to be the beginning of the story, another the end, and I had to use the remaining three words scattered throughout the text. The words Marc chose for me: tree house, disheveled, poodle, cruise missile, pipette.]

Pipette was the unsightly little creature that had to pass for a dog with our closest neighbors. She was a noisy little yapper and she regularly crawled under our hedge on her ugly belly, so that she could rant at me from even closer. The creature had an indeterminate color: a dirty kind of beige, with whitish tufts here and there and dirty dark brown around her drooling mouth. From her squinting eyes, which were red-rimmed with venom, an equally dirty brown fluid leaked, into trenches next to her strangely ugly, sticky nose.

For Agnes and Theo, our elderly neighbors, the little creature was the center of their days. Because of their boundless love for Pipette, or perhaps because their eyesight wasn’t so good anymore, they didn’t notice how disheveled the little thing looked. And their sense of smell probably wasn’t all that great anymore either, because they didn’t seem to notice that it reeked quite bad. I had repeatedly suggested they’d give their sweetheart a nice bath every now and then, but they’d explain that Pipette didn’t like foamy water. But come on, she didn’t have to drink it, did she! I had once considered giving the little horror a bath myself, if necessary, but first, I’d have to hold it (yuck!), and second, it would screech through the whole neighborhood, and thus worry my old neighbors. I think the dog was of undetermined origin, a mutt, but her owners bravely insisted that it was a poodle. So, okay then, we’d just pretend it was a poodle.

As summer approached …