Good dogs protect their families without hesitation, but I always ran when He came home. I never knew how to act around Him. The bad times could happen at any time and even though He mostly ignored me no one else was that lucky.
I thought about biting him. I growled once, before I learned to never do that again. After that I hid, only coming out to follow the sounds of crying and nose at the bruises. Pathetic.
A good dog would have fixed it. A good dog wouldn’t be scared.
When we moved into the new house there was something already living there, something that good dogs chase away. A thick shadow thing that stood in the halls at night, making hungry sounds.
It watched Him.
I watched it.
We had been living there for a year before I saw it move. I followed it down to the living room where it crawled up the couch and poured itself into his sleeping mouth. He gurgled and twitched and I hid under the big chair until he stopped clawing at his throat. When he sat up, he smiled and tried to call to me.
I stayed under the big chair for three days.
It’s been inside him for a while now, constantly writhing under his skin. No one else notices. It’s hard for humans to see I think. Seeing is a dog’s gift and if I was a good dog I would tell them.
But.
No one has cried for so long. No one hides. There are no more bruises. I let it sit beside me and scratch behind my ears. It’s voice is so nice and calm.
It calls me a good dog.
the micro fiction i wrote for Alice X’s march prompt of “
super friendly but misunderstood parasites” over on patreon.
its not a traditional nice parasite story but i’d written a traditional nice parasite story years ago and i didn’t want to repeat myself. plus, i don’t know if anyone else’s family holds this superstition, but i’ve been taught all my life that if a pet won’t go in a room or walk over a particular thing i should just follow its lead. so the thought of a pet willfully ignoring whatever it sees is both interesting and spooky whether the story is about shadow demons or human robbers.
It’s incredibly cute! This post is filled with care and love! Amazing! Parents from the black community are forced to take care of the mental health of their children from an early age, because they will face many problems related to the color of their skin, throughout their lives!
Follow the example of this wonderful and caring mother, for the sake of the future generation!
It might have been unecessarily creepy when I leaned over and whispered to my companion, “this is pretty much what me and my friends like to do when we get together.”
Nice
Did I post about how my wife was carefully watching me during this scene to judge how turned on I was getting? Fortunately, I was not getting particularly turned on. Thus, my marriage was saved.
(Little does she know: I’ve been wanting to hypnotize someone with a teacup ever since.)
i was talking to max about how my hometown in NC has changed since he’s been gone and he pointed out that our town is quickly becoming a wtnv situation. for instance:
apparently our high school, which is 96 years old and looks like a 16th century gothic castle (complete with lion gargoyles), has a fourth floor that no one really knew about until this year. no one knows how long it’s been in the building but from pictures it looks completely different than the rest and has a strange metal staircase in a spiral pattern.
there is also a basement in the high school with a swimming pool but no one is allowed down there and it is starting to rot the first floor.
for a good while there was a nice elderly black man that would stand outside of random stores and street corners and dance to make people smile. however, in the past few months he has disappeared and is nowhere to be found.
we have a kapstone paper mill in our town and it is regularly normal but some days the smell is absolutely overwhelming and blankets the town like a thick fog.
the abandoned movie theater is blocked off to the public but i was talking to some girls from school about it who occasionally break in to chill what it is like on the inside, and they said that there is a giant, bottomless hole in the entrance’s floor so they have to tiptoe across a single plank of wood to get to the other side.
fairly popular places in town will close down for literally no reason.
one time a tornado came through our town and it destroyed the sonic drive-in and a car dealership next to it but no debris could be found. only the empty lots were there. they rebuilt the sonic in less than a month but the car rental lot was kept empty and now bored teenagers harp around it like vultures.
one time my grandmother saw an unidentified animal in our backyard. she thought it was a fox but when my dog barked at it, it stood up on its back legs and ran away.
fox and coyote sightings are becoming strangely frequent in one single area of town and no one knows why???? its like they all congregate near a horse stable by an old junkyard my cousin used to work at.
whenever a dog runs away from home they all end up coming to my house. every dog that gets loose.
my grandmother saw an unidentified bird in a tree and i still can’t figure out what kind it was based on her description.
sometimes you can hear random gunshots and loud, unknown bestial screams in the uptown areas
there’s probably more but i don’t really get out much. these are just things that i’ve witnessed myself or is common knowledge in town.
another addition:
everyone forgets our mayor’s name and we’re not sure who our current mayor even is
