Do Not Juggle Small Babies
The first thing she noticed about the office was that it sounded, from the elevator, that they were keeping pigs. Which was probably against the terms of the lease. She tried keeping a dog in her apartment that didn't allow pets once and almost got an ulcer, it ate away at her so much. Before her diet became almost completely antacid tablets she gave the dog away to a friend who had moved out of the city the year before. She said she'd visit, but in her heart of hearts she knew she probably wouldn't.
Ginny, her friend with the hair (that's how everyone knew her, and if you saw her you'd immediately know which one, in a crowd, was Ginny), rose the possibility that her ulcer (or near ulcer, technically) was due more to the fact that the dog was given to her by the guy she'd been dating for four years who had disappeared one day from the apartment they shared (which had the no pets stipulation and their distinct violation of that rule with a lovely but very, very pet-like dog) without a trace until she saw him walking up the steps of the old brick apartment building a few blocks over he'd always made a point of admiring whenever they passed by. Turns out he was seeing someone else, living in that building, and she could keep the dog, he said. Which was nice of him. But Ginny seemed to think the reminder of the guy was more the cause of her problems than the actual dog and violation of the terms of her lease.
But the main point of her dog was that she'd have to bark once in a while when she heard people walking up or down the stairs to cover for the many times the dog had barked when people were walking up and down, on the off chance that it was the landlord (or a fellow tenant inclined towards snitching). And she bought rugs that hid the dog hair and covered the apartment in them, which gave the place a cozy eskimo-like feel. For this and other reasons she was never able to invite any of her friends with PETA sympathies over, even though she was pretty certain the furs were faux.
So when she rounded the corner and found a group of people in business attire clustered around a set of cubicles which had been rearranged to form a large pen and had the top half their walls removed and the floor covered with what smelled like pudding (chocolate) she was surprised, but not as surprised as she probably should have been.
To be continued...?
disclaimer:
Thank you for reading, we hope you enjoyed this budding story of ours this week.
So the reading did go off well enough, though there was a conspicuous absence of Sane Magazine readers not related to the founder (me). So I'm going to say it one last time:
Go Out And Buy Fenway Fiction Right Now!
That's it. We're somewhere down in the four hundred thousands on Amazon.com at last check, but enough about that. It's a great anthology, well worth reading, and from the comments I heard at the reading from readers it's gone over very well.
And you get the added bonus of having the original when the sequel comes out some day, with any luck with another story by the Sane Magazine founder (me). Now, listen, this isn't a sequel like Cheaper by the Dozen 2. By which I mean the original sucks so badly (note the numerous times the microphone drops into the picture and no one bothers editing that out... or at least retaking the scene) that you have no desire whatsoever to see the followup effort. In fact, you're puzzled that they even made another one. Well, not Fenway Fiction. Which has been my point all along. Go out and check it out and see. Heck, go to your local library, and if they don't have it, ask them to get it in... and when they do, check it out. You probably won't be sorry. Unless you're allergic to fiction about a certain baseball team. Which I suppose could be a legitimate condition.
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