This morning I woke up and Benji the dog was dead. I knew it the moment I opened my eyes, though of course I couldn’t be sure. I padded downstairs in my boxers and robe and opened the front door. There on the patio was Benji, on his side, in a pile of dry leaves. His small shape was startlingly well-defined against the leaves, almost as if there were a light shining behind him, but of course there wasn’t. Benji was fifteen years old when he died, which is like a million dog years I’m pretty sure. I went back inside and made some tea.

            Sitting at my kitchen facing the back window, the sun streamed across my face and across my spoon and across my cup in my hand. It made sharply defined shadows on the wall behind me as I drank my tea and watched the leaves dance in the wind. I slowly woke up: It was Sunday. Dog was dead. Laundry needed to be done. Kevin was going to call. I needed to be fed.

            One cheese, ham and tomato omelet and two pop-tarts later I was feeling ready to face the day. Who knew what surprises would be in store? Benji was just the beginning of the day, I felt, and it could only go up from here. The phone rang.

            “Kevin,” I said. It could only be him.

            “Hey man.”

            “Awake?”

            “Yeah, you?”

            “Uh huh. You coming over?”

            “Yeah. I’ll come around in a few minutes.”

            “Alright,” I said. “Just knock.”

            It would be a quiet day. I put the laundry in the washing machine and put away my dirty dishes from breakfast. Kevin was coming over to pass some time and relax; we were in the middle of a number of projects. First, we were painting my closet, just for fun. We had scrounged a number of different colors (we had black, blue, and yellow) and were going for a collaborative mural (it looked stupid so far). Second, we might work on the wagon. It had been our most ambitious project, though it was now sitting in my garage. Somewhere along the line, one of us had gotten the idea of building a four-wheeled wagon out of an old desk and two old bicycles we had between us. We’d spent more than a few nights in my garage chopping up the desk, nailing together pieces of wood, coming up with ingenious solutions for unforeseen problems, and starting to put the wheels on. It was almost done.

            Kevin knocked fifteen minutes later. I saw him through the window – he was wearing a silly looking ski cap with a tassel on top and a striped blue and yellow long-sleeve shirt from FUBU. I could tell by his clothes what kind of Kevin he’d be today.

            “Hey dude,” was what he said as I let him in. “Boy have I got a story for you.”

            Yes, it would be talkative Kevin today. That was fun. He didn’t literally have a split personality, but we all knew that Kevin alternated between two distinct moods. Sometimes he would wear sweatpants and a white t-shirt and speak in monosyllabic, one-word answers. That was quiet Kevin. He could be decent in short doses, but it did get on my nerves eventually. Then there was talkative Kevin, characterized by his funny clothing and hyperkinetic stories. Talkative Kevin came out at the strangest moments, like that one Halloween day when he came over to my house in a cheese costume. Honest to god – he just walked up to the door in a big yellow plastic piece of cheese, with a cheese hat on his head. When he walked in today though, he didn’t see Benji.

            “So here’s what happened last night,” he was saying, as my thoughts once again turned to my dog.

            “You hungry?” I cut him off.

            “Sure,” he said. We walked to the kitchen.

            “I was in Starbucks. I was sitting on a couch drinking a hot apple cider. I looked up, and I’m not sure why I looked up but I did, and she walked in.”

            Poor Benji. You never hurt a soul. You never cared about those other bitches.

            “Want some Mac-cheese?”

            “Sure. So I played it real smooth. I took another sip of my cider, and she walked right past me, but she’d seen me look, and she kind of swaggered her ass a little as she walked by.”

            “She swaggered her ass?”

            “Yeah, you know what I mean.”

            “Actually I have no idea.”

            Benji, there’ll be no more leftovers for you. Just that great big bone in the sky, I suppose.

            “Whatever. The macaroni done?”

            “Of course not.”

            “Well anyway, she orders a drink. And guess what she orders?”

            “Hot apple cider?”

            “Yes. Hot apple cider. She receives her drink and walks right up to my table and asks if it’s taken. There is an open table right next to us, but I say of course not, and she sits down.”

            “Do you realize you’ve switched tenses?” I asked. “You started your story in the past, and now you’re telling it in the present.”

            “Well, which would you prefer?”

            The past.

            “Whatever.” The microwave beeped. I served the macaroni.

            “So anyway,” he continued, “she asks, ‘what are you drinking?’ and I say, ‘A rum and coke,’ and she looks all surprised and goes, ‘Starbucks serves alcohol now?’ and I go, ‘wait, this is Starbucks? Then what am I drinking?’ feigning distress. The ice is broken and she takes my cup and sniffs. She says, ‘you got the same as me,’ and you know man, here I could have said something like, ‘no, you got the same as me’ but you know what, I had this intuition like she was tired of the coy flirting already, and it turned out I was right. We got a little serious and chatted for a bit, sipping our ciders, and she told me she was on her way to a party. I told her that I’d been waiting for a friend to call who never called, and I ended up getting in this girl’s car and going to her party.”

            “What’s her name?” I cut in.

            “Dana,” Kevin said. “Dana something. She’s about our age, she’s tall and thin, and she has amazing legs. She’s pretty, too. I don’t know man, I think I’m kind of smitten, but just wait till you hear the rest of the story.”

            For you, Benji, the story is over. But where shall you be buried?

            “So we get to this friend’s house, and it’s a pretty chill party. About thirty people are in there, playing games, dancing, drinking, eating, I don’t really know what the occasion was, but Dana knew everyone man, it was kind of cool. She took me around the party and showed me all the interesting people, ignored all the losers.”

Under your dog house? Would that work? You always protected me…

“That girl, man like what you don’t understand is that girl is in charge. She knows exactly what she wants, and she gets what she wants. You don’t argue is what I’m saying. It’s attractive, if you ask me. I’m so tired of girls being unable to decide what to eat for dinner…”

            “I know exactly what you’re saying.”

            “Well we drank, you know, and it was a great party. We talked a lot, got to know each other better, and I even mentioned you. But she was the life of the whole thing man, like everybody knew that it really only started when she got there. I felt like the male escort on her arm, and it was kind of nice.”

            “Nice?”

            “Yeah. She told me what to do, and I just did it. No questions. I got laid, too.”

            “Yeah well, I’d kind of figured that out by now.”

            “Well I just wanted to make it clear.”

            “And?”

            “And… she has blue hair.”

            “Really? That’s hot!”

            “I know. I can’t get over it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.”

            “Well,” I said. I felt the story begin to peter out. “You want to go work on the wagon?”

            “You don’t understand,” he said.

            No, that’s true. I don’t understand.

            “She’s here now.”

            “What? What are you talking about?”

            And then in she walked. No joke. How did she get in? When did this happen? I felt like I had missed some crucial aspect of Kevin’s monologue while I was thinking about my dog. Her presence just didn’t fit in with the world I knew.

            “Hello, Eli,” she said simply. I took an involuntary step backwards.

She really did have blue hair; it was bright blue with a hint of green. There was something about her face, though, that really put me off. She was conventionally pretty, no doubt about that, but I don’t know how Kevin didn’t see it – she had an ugliness in her eyes – something evil lurked right there, waiting to get out.

            Benji? Kevin picked up a large kitchen knife.

            “What the hell is going on?” I asked, panicked.

            “You just don’t get it,” he said, as he advanced towards me.

            Benji?

 

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 The rest of the story - I actually did write a lot more of this story. Go ahead and read it, if you'd like.