Poncho

Poncho was a dog.

He was medium to big in size, but wiry and lean. He had those underwater eyelids, and one was lazy and sometimes half closed even though he was on dry land. He also had trouble keeping his penis in its sheath, especially when he sat down. This caused much embarrassment to all but Poncho.

He peed like a girl and looked as though he thought he was in trouble when it snowed. He howled often and in many respects seemed to be more wolf than dog.

He lived to run.

He was a pound mutt – which doesn’t sound very nice, but he took no offence. Poncho never took offence. He was especially meek and altruistic - always willing to be the beta dog.

He lived on an enclosed, half-acre in a racially diverse neighborhood - which was kind of like a cross between a retirement home and gangland. He had plenty of room to run and seemed to enjoy regular visits from his humans who brought him food and took him for walks and told him to shut up his howling at night.

But he was still lonely. He was lonely for someone that he could sniff and lick and hump – one who would consider that kind of behavior attractive or at least acceptable. He spent an undue amount of time trying to find ways to escape from the paradise in which he was held captive. He did this more or less so that he could find someone who would let him sniff their butt. This embodied his idea of a thriving friendship.

He was allowed to run free at the lake on weekends. He would run joyously at full speed for no other reason but that God commanded it. Poncho was no blasphemer and he obeyed the Word. He never wanted to stop running – never wanted it to end.

One day God explained that it didn’t have to end, "Just don’t get back in the car. Why should you voluntarily put an end to your rapture? The free world is considerable - there are vast rivers of mud in which to trudge and countless, sundry sniffable butts."

Thus Poncho began his experiments with autonomy.

One day he went to the annual, downtown street scene where it was reported by friends that he had a grand time eating hot dogs, listening to music, and playing Frisbee on the grass.

Another time he was gone for three days and the pads on his feet were raw and bloody when he finally found his way to a friends’ house. It took him a while to recover from this one, but he had been free – free to do God’s work. For three glorious days he was able to express his dogness unhampered by the shackles of humanity. He had known bliss.

But in his lust, Poncho was oblivious to the evils that lurked in the dark and seedy underbelly of his free world – mechanical monsters with metal teeth, underpaid state workers with tasers and nets, and every dog’s arch nemesis: little boys with BB guns.

Poncho had not eaten of the tree and knew naught of its fruit.

So the humans spent hundreds of dollars and every free moment trying to keep him from harming himself and the neighbors’ trash. Each weekend a new project was taken up to reinforce the walls of his prison – chicken wire, barbed wire, electric wire – and each week he would run emancipated in some Homeric orgy, inevitably humping any neighboring dog he could find.

Well eventually, the dim-witted humans put two and two together and got Poncho a dog. His name was Steve Peagram and he had kennel cough.