Cats and dogs 2 for 1

In an almost unbelievable boon for you today I have two interconnected stories instead of one. Yes, you heard me correctly, that is two stories instead of one!

What's that you ask?

Are they any good?

Well, I tested the first story as an oral tradition story last night and, frankly, it tanked. But anything can happen in prose. Why, just look at it happening now!

The second story I thought of two minutes ago, but, right from the beginning, it seemed a tad slight to me. But please refer to my previous comment about how anything can happen in prose. Besides, my bread and butter here isn't my stories, it's my freewheeling introductory comments.

The first story is about perspectives and being so absorbed in my own that coming suddenly upon someone else's Rashomon-like, utterly different perspective, can be at once appalling, funny, and illuminating.

I was out walking, cutting through a sort of parking lot/alley, absorbed in my thoughts, when I looked up to see a woman and her dog coming the other way. The dog was not on a leash and was of a low, vicious, vacuum cleaner variety. It had a compact body of pure muscle and a giant, all jaw head that will clamp onto one's leg in a uni-directional manner, meaning it can bite down, but can't release and has to be surgically removed. The dog walker was, to me, desperately trying to get her dog on the leash before it attacked again, and I was steeling myself for a fight in which I pictured myself feverishly stomping the violent, possibly rabid animal on the head until the skull broke apart and the brains of the dog squished horrifically onto a blood soaked sidewalk.

As all this was going on I noticed someone to my right. A man was standing by a truck staring over at the killer dog with a look of besotted adoration. Nothing was easier to see in his face than a delighted exclamation of "PUPPY!".

In story two I am also walking through my neighborhood. Someone has lost some kind of black and white dog, and they're going nuts. There are signs everywhere. They tell you what to do and not do if you see the dog, where to go, and who to contact. Every time I see one of these signs, and there are dozens, I am mildly annoyed and just wish everyone would leave me alone without all their endless dog stuff. Keep your little slave animal to yourself if you have to have one so bad, and stop losing them!

Then, on a phone pole, I saw a cheap, poorly attached copy paper flapping in the breeze. "Lost Kitten" it read, and my heart cried out with love and concern.

 "KITTY!".