Cave Canem Cibus

or Beware Of The Dog Food

This happened at a time, so long ago, when telephones were still connected to the wall. Writing this tale is like writing about ancient Rome. It seems so distant, but people and dogs are still people and dogs.

All four had been living together for a couple of months, two were humans, college students and cell phones had not yet been invented. She had a great Dane. He had one, too. They met walking their dogs. Each appreciated the clever name the other had for their dog. Her giant canine was ironically called, Fluffy. His was, Doorstop. He wanted to call his dog Brutus or Zeus, something classic. He thought it would be brilliant to lean out his door and yell at the top of his lungs, "Hey Zeus"!

Doorstop, however, suited the beast. His pet would lay down to sleep next to a door, invariably on the side that prevented the door from opening. Instead of calling "Hey, Zeus", he found himself yelling at the dog to quit being a doorstop.

Doorstop was an appropriate name.

Two college students with interestingly named Great Danes, what more would they need in common? They fell in love and decided to abandon their dorms, which were already problematic, due in part to the no pets rule, not to mention the room mates who always walked in at the wrong time.

Because of their massive dogs they couldn’t find a normal apartment or nice house close to campus. Instead, they rented an older house, with white painted siding, on the edge of town, which suited them well enough. In your senior year of college, love and tuition is all you really need. It doesn’t matter where you live. If you have a car you can drive to school.

Her family lived on the East Coast. She already had her airline ticket for Christmas vacation before Doorstop and Fluffy tangled their leashes. She’d stayed at school during Thanksgiving, and couldn’t very well say no to her family, especially since she had the ticket. He volunteered to stay at home with the dogs. He didn’t have any interest in going along, so he avoided bringing that up. The idea of a week with her family didn’t appeal to him. Even his own family was of no particular interest to him. He had no holiday plans and the snow on the ski slopes was too patchy to tempt him. He drove her to the airport, kissed her, and said, "See you in a week".

He was going to study for exams and work on his thesis. His major was ancient history, yet he had no history of self reliance. As a boy, his mother took care of him. In the dorm, every meal was served, even his laundry was washed and folded. He hadn’t considered how he would survive without her. It remained a portion of his education that was a blank. She did all the cooking and cleaning. For an almost educated woman, she was unaware how her domestic skills were dysfunctionally enabling to him. His cooking and domestic skills were nonexistent. As it turns out, so was his focus and concentration on studies or on writing his thesis.

Before she left, she had gone to the grocery store to stock the cupboards and refrigerator with everything he might need. If he had only put the gallon of milk away in the refrigerator it should have lasted a week. Within days he was eating breakfast cereal directly from the box, for all three meals. The dogs were fine with dried food, weren’t they? Then, he’d be fine, too.

When he ate, so did Fluffy and Doorstop. Their food was kept in a gigantic paper sack on the floor of the kitchen closet. He’d fill an old tin coffee can with KennelRation dry dog food for each dog and dump it into their bowls before he sat to eat. Otherwise both Danes would beg for his cereal and not leave him alone. He did know enough to eat a balanced diet. When the dogs woke him at 6 am, he’d eat rice, in the form of Cocoa Krispies, then return to bed for several more hours. Without her or the routine of daily classes, he reverted to the sleeping schedule and energy level of a severely depressed person. Before going to bed at the end of the day, which you and I might consider proper bedtime, he’d eat a few handfuls of Sugar Smacks, from the box. They were exploded wheat, you know. He had just finished his noonish meal of, corn grain, Sugar Pops when the telephone rang. His old dorm mate reported to him the updated ski conditions and announced he was heading to the slopes. He had a place to stay and two free ski passes. He just needed a ride. Oh, and he had that extra ski pass, if you missed it the first time.

The study/thesis writing was boring and it was not as much fun hanging around the house as he thought it would be. This was a great opportunity to snap out of his lethargy. He could have a few days of great skiing and get back in time before he is girlfriend returned. She wouldn’t even know he had hit the slopes without her.

He had just enough cash for gas, but not enough to put the dogs into a kennel. It might cost more than he could afford, so he called a few numbers, hoping to find a free dog-sitter. His calls went unanswered. His friends were away. Probably visiting parents or already on the slopes! No one was around to take care of the dogs or even check on them. Oh, well. He’d tried. He’d have to accept fate.

He felt that fate told him to make the most of the situation. Wasn’t this a Carpe Diem situation? Sure it was. The solution was obvious, the dogs didn’t need a sitter, they had each other. The dogs could entertain each other.

He turned on all the lights so the two great Danes could see each other all the time. They’d never be lonely. Doorstop could sleep in front of any door he wanted and not be yelled at. That should make him happy. Next, he filled the bathtub with water and left the toilet seat up. He flushed once more so the dogs would have fresh water in the bowl.

Just before he locked the door and drove off, he pulled the 50 pound bag of dry dog food out of the closet and stabbed it with a butcher knife. He cut a large "X" and peeled bach the paper a little, so the dogs could eat when they were hungry. "Bye, Fluffy. Bye, Doorstop. Behave yourselves while daddy is gone". Fluffy and Doorstop bounded to the window and watched, howling in tandem, as he drove off.

Sometime later the battery in the kitchen clock died. Fluffy’s ears noticed the silence. Then the battery in the smoke detector quit. Both dogs barked each time the alarm asked for a fresh battery with a short beep. It went on like this until he returned home.

A snowfall the night before had seduced him to linger on the powder packed hills a little longer. So what if his girlfriend would be home in a couple of hours, he had it covered. He’d be sitting on the couch, pretending to be working on his thesis, when she walked into the house. He’s play it as if he was concentrating so hard, he never heard her unlock the door.

Imagine his impending shock. He would be unprepared for what Fluffy and

Doorstop had done. He thought about how smart he’d been when he poured the spoiled milk down the drain, rather than letting the dogs devour it. They might have gotten sick. Damn right they’d get sick.

It had not entered his mind that the dogs would eat all fifty pounds of dry food on the first day. He couldn’t have predicted that. He also couldn’t have predicted that eating all the food would cause them both to become ill, ejecting the food from both ends. If only that had been the end of it.

Hungry dogs will eat anything, a point that had escaped his attention. Note I didn’t say "almost anything". If it can fit into the mouth, it can be eaten. They will eat it until it is gone. "What? No more dog chow?" Please understand that it is not my intention to gross you out, but any dog is capable of finding nutrition in the vilest of substances, including their own feces. Feces sounds like a Latin word, but isn’t. Dogs have a keen sense of smell, which doesn’t mean they will avoid things we would not like to step on, but are instead drawn to it. Speaking of stepping on feces, not only were his and her shoes consumed by the time he returned, so were their leather belts. He didn’t know of any of this as he slid the key into the kitchen door and turned the knob.

When he walked through the door Fluffy pinned him against the kitchen wall with her front paws mopped his face with a particularly nasty smelling tongue.

Doorstop lay in the doorway to the living room methodically shredding the remains of the dog food sack, his tongue gleaning any embedded morsel. He chased both dogs outside into the snowy landscape. They loped around the yard, rolling in the powder and frolicking like the freed prisoners they were. He let them stay out and have some fun while he went back to maybe straighten up a little. When he reentered, there was no giant dog to pounce on him or distract him from what he missed just seconds before. This time the smell hit him over the head, like a drunk clobbered with a frying pan in an old time movie.

His nostrils flared and wanted to scream. But nostrils don’t scream. So he put one hand over his nose. His eyeballs nearly exploded at the sight before him. The house looked worse than his old dorm room looked after

that five-day-non-stop-party. He suddenly became nostalgic for the acid smell of puke and countless broken beer bottles. What the hell had these monster dogs done? Frantic does not adequately describe his state of mind.

Although it was cold outside, he ran, as if possessed by demons, room to room, opening every window that wasn’t painted shut. He rummaged around the bathroom cupboards and located a few nearly empty cans of bathroom spray. So little was in each can that he used his underarm deodorant and all his aftershave, and shaking it in every room of the house. The effort was futile. Each and every carpet was soaked with urine. The entire floor percolated with an intense ammonia scent.

He dug a window fan from under a pile of boxes and aimed it at the center of the wall to wall shag carpet in the living room. The rug could no longer be described as shaggy. This formerly shaggy rug had been beaten down and was matted. It was hard to see, in its current state that it had once been a delightful blend of aqua and lavender synthetic yarn, some designer’s fantasy, a landlord’s fantastic bargain.

The entire house had a dusting of dog hair, mixed with paper fiber and dog food residue along with the excrement. The kitchen floor didn’t look too bad, from afar. There were no puddles. He didn’t have time to look closely. The kitchen floor was a tan and brown checkerboard of asphalt tile, the type that looks smeared and dirty on purpose, so when you drop a piece of peanut buttered toast face down, you don’t even have to wipe it up. Perhaps it would have been wise to sweep the floor with a broom before squirting a bottle of floor polish around the room and smearing it with a wet mop. But he didn’t have time for wise thoughts. This was time for action! For the time being the newly slathered floor wax looked shiny. He didn’t know that once the floor polish dried, the trapped dirt and debris would transform the entire kitchen floor into a gigantic sheet of sandpaper. Time was running out. His girlfriend would be home soon, too soon. The phone rang. He thought it might be his old room mate asking why he left without bringing him back to school? No, it was her.

She called from the airport to say her flight had landed early, but that an old friend , who arrived on the same flight, who would drop her off. He hadn’t considered she might arrive earlier. That would have been a set back, but her old friend had just bought him more time. He had a fleeting feeling of momentary relief. Time really was ticking away, or should have been. He heard the intermittent beep of the fire alarm, asking for a fresh battery. He didn’t understand where the beeps were coming from. Was it the clock? He looked at the clock and wondered if no time had actually passed since he’d entered the house. Was this all an illusion? Then he looked at his wristwatch. There was no illusion.

Why had the dogs done this to him and what was that beep again? It sounded like a cricket. Maybe it was just a cricket. He had to make the place look presentable if not normal and the floor polish wasn’t drying fast enough. He turned the thermostat to the furnace all the way up, closed the windows, Then directed the fan toward the kitchen door. The tile floor was still wet and shiny, with polish. It needed to dry faster. He carefully tip toed over the wet polish to the gas stove and opened the oven door. He paused a second, noting how clean the inside of the oven looked. He’d never looked inside it before.

It was sparkling clean. He turned the switch and watched a blue flame come to life. There, that will help dry the kitchen floor. He turned the flame all the way up and left the oven door wide open.

The house still reeked. Maybe he should use a bottle of her perfume to mask the awful smell. Great Idea! Maybe she’d also be distracted if he put her favorite music on the stereo. Loud is good, right? Carole King or Janis Joplin? Okay, Janis it is.

Then he remembered the dogs. He looked out the front door and called for them. "Here, Fluffy. Here, Doorstop." He went out the back and called again. Their tracks went in the direction of the alley and toward the old cemetery. He followed their paw prints. The freshly fallen snow made this easier than he deserved. His running Great Danes had a significant head start on him. Who knows how far their long legs could have carried them while he has inside magnifying the disaster with floor polish? Fortunately for him, the dogs paused every few yards to wrestle. He tracked them around the corner and caught up with them in front of their own home just as a Volkswagen mini van slid to a stop on the icy street. He looked up from the dogs to the van’s passenger window. Timing couldn’t have been better.

The Great Danes were romping again, happy to see her. They wanted to show mommy what fun they’d had while she and daddy were away. Come on, let’s go into our house, they seemed to say. Then, maybe they only wanted to be fed. The dogs were excited, no matter the reason.

But as excited as the dogs were, he was hit with a sudden dread. Actually, it was nausea induced guilt. He closed his eyes and wished the interior of the house had been returned to normal while he was hunting for the dogs. That was impossible. He next imagined, as he turned from the van toward the house, a great rush of air and blue flame filling the structure, sending window frames, white painted siding, and parts of a clean oven through the crisp holiday sky. The shards of glass sparkled like thick snowflakes twisting in the light. No, he didn’t imagine an explosion, he prayed for one.

That night all of his prayers would be unanswered. The door was wide open. Janis Joplin was singing her loudest, playing the part of a siren, beckoning the foursome to come home to the jagged rocks.

Both dogs were nudging her, trying to herd her into the house. She turned her head and gave a tiny wave to the driver, who sat watching from his mini van.

Her gesture was observed by her boyfriend, who then turned and looked at the driver, at last recognizing him. The driver was her old boyfriend who far too often called late at night.

Neither guy waved to the other.

They were four black silhouettes and a driver seated in a mini van, set against what might have been the exploding brilliance of the house. The mini van might have rocked toward the driver side a little and bobbed back. If there had been an explosion it might also have knocked down the four outside the vehicle, including the dogs. The driver would then have had an excuse to jump from the van and help her to her feet.

Instead the van pulled away before a less brilliant explosion ignited.

Sandy Kinnee

January 3, 2006

4^th Draft