Me and Bunches
A mostly fictional story by Scott Teel

I was surprised when my dog, Bunches, spoke to me the other day. Unfortunately, whatever he said was in German, so I couldn’t understand a word of it.  It was definitely German.  I could recognize it.  But I don’t know what he wanted to tell me so badly that he learned German.  So I brought him to the library and sat him there while I read German phrases to him out of a language book.

“Sprechenzie Deutsche?”  I asked him repeatedly, until I was thrown out of the library.  Bunches was thrown out about a half hour later.

On the way home, I hit on a pretty girl, because I've heard that women love a guy who’s walking a dog.  She told me my face looked like someone had beat me with the ugly stick.  I told her, no, it was just a regular stick, and would she like to join me for dinner?  She must not have liked food, because she said no.

The next day, I let Bunches out in the backyard and made some coffee.  I don’t drink coffee, but I always make a pot because you never know when you might want to start.  When I looked out into the yard, Bunches had uncovered the remains of a fragile, primitive, archeological site, with bones and spear tips clearly labeled and the area around an ancient stone hearth roped off.  Well, I had no choice but to punish him, since I had taught him not to dig, and I wouldn’t let him publish his report in Scientific American.

I had heard that chocolate can kill a dog, but I accidentally dropped a Toblerone bar on Bunches’ head once, and luckily it didn't kill him.  Instead, he bit me on the butt.  It didn’t hurt much, since I have a prosthetic buttock.  I lost the buttock five years ago.  I was in a store and decided to photocopy my rear end, but it turned out it wasn’t a copier, it was a meat slicer.  It turns out butcher shops don’t have photocopiers. They charged me $3.50 a pound to get the buttock back.  It wasn’t worth it, it was so tough I could hardly chew it.

The mailman used to be afraid of Bunches, even though I told him the dog was harmless.  One day, just to show him Bunches wouldn’t bite him, I knocked him down, hog tied him, yanked his pants off, and poured steak sauce on his privates while Bunches sat nearby.  Bunches didn't try to bite him, but I still don’t think the mailman was convinced, since he never came up to the house again.  Another man did deliver one letter to me, but it was from a judge telling me to stay 500 feet away from the mailman.  I guess the mailman has some sort of communicable disease they don’t want me to catch.

Bunches hates taking pills.  I used to hide them in a piece of chicken, but then Bunches became a vegetarian.  Now I have to stick the pill way back in his throat and rub his neck until he swallows it.  Sometimes he still spits it out, which is a real waste of money because those estrogen pills are expensive.

I strictly taught Bunches to stay off my bed, because dog hair makes me dream about Koala bears, but I kept finding little hairs all over my pillow. I yelled at the dog, and then one day I realized my eyebrows were going bald.  It was my own eyebrow hair on the pillow.  I can only assume that it was me who crapped on the den rug as well.

I hugged Bunches the other night, and said to him, “Well, at least we have each other, right boy?”

He said, “You know, your breath stinks.  I mean, I drink out of the toilet and my breath isn’t half that bad.  Between that and your ugly puss, it’s no wonder women reject you.”

Amazing!  He had talked again!  I told him to shut up.

© 2005 Scott Teel