spacious skies - 36. joan

by american joe

part 36 of 40

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a black dog ran down the street under a blue sky. the blue sky was filled with white clouds. a woman in a yellow dress came out of her house. the house was painted white. it had a red roof. the woman was annoyed when she walked around her green lawn and saw the holes in it made by rabbits. her name was joan sanders and she went back inside the house and made herself an ice cold drink. sipping the drink, she remembered the days when she had more to worry about than lawns and rabbits. the black dog ran back up the street. it saw a small rabbit on joan sanders’s lawn and chased it. the rabbit ran away and got under a fence and into a hole in the lawn of the house behind joan sanders’s. joan heard the dog bark when the rabbit disappeared under the fence, but she paid no attention to it and continued sipping her drink. when she finished the drink she debated whether to look up a pest control company online in order to deal with the rabbits, turn on the television and watch the news, or make another drink. the dog, whose name was avenger, sniffed at the fence a few times and then gave it up and went back across joan sanders’s lawn and back on to the street. avenger was, of course, not supposed to be running around loose and up and down streets on his own, but he belonged to a man named ralph richards, who considered himself to be a rebel and an outlaw. nobody told ralph or his dog what to do. they were wild and free. ralph lived on the street parallel to the one joan sanders lived on. ralph and joan had never met and were not aware of each others’ existences. next