I Let The Dogs Out

The day the dogs got out, I swore I’d never have children. One dark-haired Pitbull Rottweiler six-month-old puppy chasing after a one-year-old Jack Russell Chihuahua mix. Still wearing my purple nightgown, I chased after them. Going through green neighborhood yard after green neighborhood backyard, I could feel the wet grass on the bottom of my bare feet.

“Coco! Blue!”

I screamed their names friendly-like until I got the bright idea that I might need some help. With an increasing panic thumbing with my logic, I went inside to enlist my father in the hunt.

He was in the garage using the exercise bike. “Daddy! Daddy, the dogs got out.” Retaining some calm, he slowed his pedal and grabbed a thin, black cable cord.

“No! We need their leashes. Don’t the dogs have leashes?”

I’d only been back with my family for a few days, but my husband and I had feigned normalcy earlier in the week; each of us with a leashed dog, taking a stroll. I painfully watched as he attempted to walk the Pitbull.

“He’s trained now!” my brother told me excitedly over a FaceTime call some weeks prior. I disapprove of much of their life, so there’s a constant desire to update me on positive happenings, even when it’s all wishful thinking.

“I don’t know where leashes are,” my father said in his deep Haitian accent.

“That’s not going to work!”