Flash Fiction: ‘Hot Dogs’ and ‘Devil Dog’
Demetria Glennon
Hotdogs
At the peak of swimming season at a small upstate New York lake, popular for families camping with small children who do not listen when water hits their toes and the smell of unregulated gasoline motors infects their brains, a young boy screams out from the middle of the lake, gurgling on the bloody water that dyes around him and, when he is pulled out of the water but a young girl tubing next to him, three toes on his left foot are missing leaving his bones to pop out like lollipop sticks. The scene is like a shark in Amity and as the families drag their little ones out of the water, the ambulance is called, and the little boys leg is wrapped in a popped Dora the Explora tube as a tourniquet, the scandal becomes what such creature could do such a thing to a little boy.
He is rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, spoken to softly by a new EMT who, when he sees the boy’s toeless foot, remembers that he forgot to defrost the hot dogs he promised his wife he would grill when he got home. He realizes now what people meant when they said the job would wreck his marriage, the new hours taking over his time and the images he sees taking over his mind. That night, when he gets home to the hotdogs weren’t defrosted in time for dinner and a wife who has now cooked spaghetti and sits with a sad look on her face, he admits that he cannot eat anything red and she wonders if they will ever be normal again with this new responsibility he has taken on and that night, when they lay down and she tries to have sex with him, only for her to touch him and him to blurt out that anything nubbish and red and hot dog or toe like makes him want to throw up, she realizes they never will.
As his wife does after nights where they sleep silently and she wonders if the man she married is the same boy she loved in high school, she calls her mother the next morning, only for her to ask if her husband helped with the little boy who was maimed at Little Neck Cove yesterday and she must confess she does not know. They don’t talk anymore. The move has been terrible for them and she doesn’t know why he left
accounting to save lives. According to the news, it was a snapping turtle or a cottonmouth or a water moccasin and she must remind her mother that they do not live in Virginia anymore and water moccasins don’t make home in New York but her mother does not listen. In fact, her brain has gone somewhere else to her neighbor whose marriage has also begun to fall apart—she knows because she hears their screams from the house over each night and hopes that maybe, because her daughter and son in law are at least not fighting like this, it will bring her comfort.
Devil Dog
Behind her door was madness and a place that she could not stay, could not find quiet or a chance to think—there was nothing beyond the knowingness of the life that existed here and ruined her everyday. He screamed behind her, repeatedly, relentlessly, about something that she had forgotten about by this point. Had it been the trash? The crust on the pie not being baked enough? Or was it the peas in the pie? Or the dog’s toys in the satanic circle he always created when they left for work and crept him out if it was there when he got home? Or maybe the wet shoe marks left on the floor from her running inside after being stuck at the office for another day this week?
Something flew past her head, close enough to tickle the ends of her hair and make her stop breathing. Her eyes moved sideways and down, slowly, as if moving her body at all would result in some sort of irreparable harm. A red lobster wet with saliva and dirty with dust. Goddamn their satanic dog.
He kept screaming to a point where her ears went deaf and hot and red with blood rushing to them trying to make them work and she wondered if her ears gave up at the sound of it, how didn’t his lungs or voice box give out at his efforts to berate her over and over again. Then a duck at her head that squawked like it was shot when it hit the wall. A knotted rope that chipped off the merlot paint that ordained their kitchen. She thought about that paint, how picking it out and planning a life together was blissful in the early days of their marriage, how, now, if she had known what life was going to be like, she wouldn’t have picked a color that reminded her of bruises. Their whole house was a bruise—merlot in the kitchen, avocado in the dining room, aurora blue in their bedroom. A rubber ball aimed at her back hit the back of her knee, flung down like a dodgeball an anxious seventh grader tried too hard to aim with, making her legs give out beneath her dropping her to the floor on her knees. Merlot, avocado, aurora. And he was on her in an instant. Screeching that same chest squeezing yell behind her and, feeling his hot breath on the back of her neck, she thought of their possibly satanic dog, that barked behind him as he did this, never biting him like she wished but cluelessly playing fetch with himself as his toys flew around the room and she cried deep spastic tears onto lenolium. He was dumb and satanic and with her husband’s hot breath on her neck, smelling like her dogs in the morning when he was hungry, she flung her eyes up above her and reached out her hand, pulling down on the handle, and flinging open their front door.
On all fours, she stared out into the night, a night of black skies and downpour and slowly, as if it would do anything, she began to crawl outside away from it all.
Demetria Glennon is a junior in the Rutgers Honors College, majoring in English, minoring in creative writing, and pursuing a master’s degree in elementary education and K-12 English education. She grew up in Bloomfield, NJ, and has always had a passion for writing, self-publishing two collections of poetry by the time she graduated high school. Her other hobbies include reading, crochet, baking, cooking, and arts and crafts. She currently lives at home with her parents and old dog Biscuit and hopes to pursue writing more in the future. When writing, she is inspired by the world around her and the inexplicable thoughts that enter her brain that she is too afraid to say out loud. Her goal in life is to inspire people and find others who share her passion for human connection and literature.