EXCERPT 2 FROM HOUNDED: A LOVE STORY - DARTH, CAN TALK
The desperate dog looks straight into Felix’s eyes, and with every ounce of his being, he pleads, “No! Not the shelter! Don’t send me back! Please!”
Stupefied to the core, Felix drops Darth onto the floor. After picking his jaw up off the floor, out of his gaping mouth, comes an utterance, “You talk.”
“So do you.” responds the dog.
“I’m a human being.”
“That’s nothing to brag about.”
“I wasn’t bragging. I was just saying—"
Darth interrupts, crying out, “You know what human beings do to dogs in the shelter? Do you? You kill us.”
Felix tries to make sense of it, What the holy fuck is going on? Dogs do not talk. Must have been another one of my brain farts. He makes his way across the room on legs made of Jell-O, sinks into the couch. and gazes at the dog, the talking dog, on the floor, still trembling. Darth asks, “You still taking me back to the shelter?” Felix, in a state of shock, ponders that and finds himself shaking his head, no.
“So, this is my home?”
Felix mutters, “I can’t be actually having a conversation with a dog.”
Darth says, “I’m gonna take a look around.”
“You’ve been here for days.”
“It’s different now. This is my home.”
Felix watches with fascination as Darth’s twitching nose examines everything in sight, his feather-duster tail signaling his likes and dislikes, “A dog lived here.”
“Helluva nose you’ve got. That was thirty years ago, my dad’s dog, Vincent.”
“Vincent was very sick,” says Darth gravely.
“He died in this house,” Felix says.
“Better than dying in the shelter,” says Darth as he wanders away. Felix gazes at his new roommate, and the child in him, which is almost all of him, simply accepts that the dog can talk.