On Life as a Sarcastic Fringehead

I can’t help her, but she walks in, light and breezy and pretty and determined to misunderstand nearly every word that comes out of my mouth. She thinks flirting with me will help as she moves with a purposeful fluidity from bin to bin overflowing with cheap shit that will never at all advance her cause. I follow her because she attracts people that way. They—we—can’t stop ourselves. With a half smile, I sort with her a bin filled with screws, pencils and cassette tapes. My fingers come across a dog’s leash, prompting me to say: Awesome dog outside.

Frag continues here

Her absent-minded cursory thanks slam right up against her more pressing issue. “I used to have this woven vinyl key chain that I made at summer camp right before fifth grade. I had that key chain forever. I’m thinking that I accidentally threw it away and you, Stillwater, can’t tell me it’s not around here somewhere.”

“It’s not here and it’s irrelevant,” I said for the 400th time since she’d walked in. Evidently, girly had a lot of missing minutiae and what she needed most, apparently, was to stand next to me and catalogue its entirety. “What’s the dog’s name?”

“He’s a Neapolitan mastiff and there are lots of them named Neo and that’s what I named mine, but I spell it N-e-e-y-o.”

“That’s terrible,” I say out loud. Hell, she’d been in the store for almost two hours telling me the most intimate details of her life. By then, we were surely friends. Friends don’t let friends give their dogs intentionally misspelled fucked up names.

I untied the dog from his post and brought him inside the shop while Parker pulled his dinner from her backpack. I decide to call him, only between him and me, Ferocious Beast That Lazes in the Sun When Sated.