Steve watched her go. He could feel confusion stretching his features, and in this particular instance he didn’t feel bad about it. The interaction he’d just experienced made very little sense and he knew it. Was so confident in it, in fact, that he wondered whether he’d actually missed something. His belief and the situation’s outcome were just so divergent.
Then he realized the schnauzer was in fact very dirty, as was the kitchen, and while it was probably The Hermit’s actual fault The Hermit was not around to do anything about it. Making his mind up, Steve went to the door, opened it, clicked his tongue, and followed the bounding dog into the night.
It was well lit. The generators were running, which was one of those things he could tell himself to be happy about. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it just made him remember that he had once lived in a world where you had to decide you felt like having a generator in order for that to govern the light situation. Didn’t do much good to think about it now though, and he called the schnauzer, which had immediately sprinted to the chicken pen to sniff around, back to where the water hose hung from a reel by the door. It eyed him warily but came, head hung down below its monstrous knees. Steve smiled.
“You’re not in trouble,” he said, turning on the water. “Just dirty as shit.” He pulled the handle on the nozzle and the icy jet arced out, spraying coat and muzzle and paws in a tight stream interrupted by regular attempts at a bite. Steve wondered what the hell that was about, if it was some kind of defense or an attempt to get a drink or some kind of weird game no human could comprehend. Because the schnauzer never ran away, it just took its spraying and tried to bite the water over and over again. He thought, not for the first time, that perhaps the schnauzer had brain damage. Then his shoulder ached and he thought about how death had been real earlier that day and decided maybe accusing his savior of being deficient wasn’t acutely fair at the moment. He whirled his finger and his subject turned, hair straightening under the weight of water but clean finally. Then he opened the side door, confirmed the inner door was closed, and the two of them stepped back into the house.
You say to yourself: and how does this matter? Why, when Steve is at least dubious about the wolf explanation, is he, mid-night, murderer adjacent, and potentially subject to existential reprisal, cleaning mud from a being that would eventually get clean on its own?
We say to you: why exactly the fuck not? We hold that obsessions are unhealthy but unavoidable, and that among the least bad are cleanliness and pets. So Steve, cleaning his pet at this supreme moment of chaos, probably ought to be held up as some kind of champion for the averse. Even in this moment of supreme chaos and danger he found time- and there was time- to indulge a maniac- consider Sheila, won’t you?- and clean his pet all at the same time. And that, we think, is normal triumphing over divergent. Briefly, perhaps- there’s no way to tell- but inspiringly too.
Steve, locked in a tiny pseudo-room with a great wet happy bear, realized quickly that he had made an error. The schnauzer, realizing itself their proximity, leapt upon Steve quickly and with a lapping tongue that ran from the top of Steve’s neck to the crown of his head. Steve, with one good arm and one mangled one, attempted to resist with seventy-five percent of his normal capability and, in a situation where full power was usually not enough, failed abjectly and found himself pinned to the ground beneath his loving canine captor. It was an unenviable position, and Steve, in pain but amused in the way only the owner of a dog can be at their sometimes execrable behavior, began to laugh. This, as most might be able to predict, only encouraged the schnauzer, which redoubled its efforts. It didn’t, as they say, have anything else to do right then.
Suddenly, and- if it needed to be said- without warning, the inner door flew open. Steve looked up from his perch on the ground to see a confused iteration of Sheila, anger and bewilderment commingling on her face like that river convergence in Brazil where the one river is black and the other is brown and for awhile they run together like a cross section of a peanut butter cup. The schnauzer, also momentarily confused, ceased licking Steve and stood astride him. It stared at Sheila. It looked down at Steve. It looked back to Sheila. Sheila and Steve together began to form the word ‘No’ but failed, despite its brevity, to complete it before the schnauzer lept with all four paws towards Sheila and took her down in a stunning pseudo-grapple and began, as with Steve, to taste her visage with its preposterous tongue.
Sheila, being less inclined to either horseplay or dogplay than Steve had ever been, did not at first react positively. This was followed by ever worsening reactions while Steve, as mentioned not at full strength, attempted to yank her enormous attacker backwards. He failed, as might be expected, and eventually collapsed backwards against a wall in a fit of laughter that hurt but could nevertheless not be stopped. He watched through watery slits as the schnauzer continued to lick and Sheila continued to fight and curse and curse and fight and fail to achieve any goal she set for herself, whether conscious or un-, before finally dropping in exhasution to the floor and allowing nature to take its course.
The schnauzer promptly stopped and lay, with all its weight, directly on top of her with a loud huff.
“Fucking dog,” Sheila said, struggling for breath.
“He likes you,” Steve replied, finally catching his.
“And food,” Shiela replied, twisting to try and force the direct impact of her newly-combined bulk onto the meatier bits of her frame. “He’s heavy. Get off me, fatso.”
The schnauzer yawned but otherwise failed to react.
“At least he’s clean now.”
“And wet. I’m soaked.” Steve considered this, and then his own clothes.
“I took some off him for you,” he said.
“Yeah well. Thank you for your service. Can you take some of him off me for me now? It would be nice to inhale.”
Steve, at something of a loss, shrugged and grabbed the schnauzer’s collar with one hand, pulling as hard as he could. He felt a slight roll and grunted that Sheila should slide the opposite direction, lest he release the weight and kill her with gravity’s rebound. Picking up what Steve was failing to lay down, Sheila rolled and extricated herself just as the schnauzer was freed to lay with another gruff sigh in the entryway.
“Guess we don’t need to lock this one tonight,” Steve said, catching his breath.
“Unless a mountain climber decides to come in. We feed this thing too much,” Sheila replied, one hand resting on the schnauzer’s back in a gesture of resigned exhaustion. “He’d feed a village in the hinterlands if we butchered him.”
“Especially now,” Steve said, before collapsing back into defeated laughter. His belly hurt from it, the intense release, even as his body could no longer fight the tide of joy. It wasn’t funny. Everybody was dead. And yet, it was, even though they were. Maybe because they were. All Steve knew was he couldn’t stop and, in the throes of it, he didn’t exactly want to.
Eventually they wound down. When the silence settled things felt normal, comfortable again, and despite the throbbing in his shoulder Steve stood and moved to the kitchen, where he began shuffling muddy table items into the sink. He got down to the tablecloth, folded it, and took it straight to the washroom. He dumped it, mud and all, into one of the buckets they used, and when he returned to the kitchen he found Sheila with a wet towel, wiping specks of dried mud carefully off the so-recently adorned walls. He went back to dishwashing and as they bantered and carried on with their chosen tasks, in a normal fashion the world and time over, the kitchen slowly retained its former mostly-clean-ness, in the way of most kitchens in history where nobody got paid to clean them.
Then, suddenly, it was clean, and they were done, and the schnauzer was dry and had moved itself to a more suitable perch atop the couch, which bent under its unwieldy bulk in the way most couches don’t actually ever do, and Steve was in fact able to lock the door, and it was time, mercifully, to collapse into bed and try to recover from what had been, as far as he could remember, easily the longest day of his entire life.
