Angel

Between the Buttons

A Dog and His Boy
Don starts talking without looking at anyone in particular.
 Just words filling the shop air 
like dust caught in a shaft of light.
“I don’t even know anymore, Tiger.
 I’ve been writing for two years 
 world-building, diagrams, 
 spreadsheets of imaginary wars.
 And now I can’t even start.
 
Everyone online says read more.
 So I do.
 I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream — brilliant,
 but it’s like being waterboarded with adjectives.
 Then Game of Thrones — 
 dense, functional, slightly medieval spreadsheet.
 Then The Hunger Games — 
 which felt right, rhythm-wise, but it still drags.

Tiger lifts his head from the floor.
 “Maybe you’re just buffering,” he says.
Don keeps going, oblivious.
 “I feel like if I can’t even follow the narration,
 I’ll never create one.
 Maybe I only started writing to survive the bad weeks.”

Tiger stretches, it sounds like velcro.
 “You’re over-complicating it.
 You ever notice how I fetch the ball?
 You throw it, I chase it, 
 sometimes it bounces off the lawnmower, 
 sometimes I forget what I’m doing halfway there.
 I always come back with something.
 Maybe it’s the ball. Maybe it’s a stick.
 Once it was the neighbor’s bra.
 It's not a linear process."

Don blinks.
 “Are we really doing metaphors right now? You’re a dog.”
Tiger takes a second to lick his crotch before continuing.
“Dogs are systems too.
 Input, output, reward feedback.
 You’re the one trying to write 
 the human equivalent of firmware version 1.0.
 Just push the update, sort it later”

Don laughs despite himself.
 “You mean keep writing even if it’s garbage?”
 “I mean, don’t mistake the garbage for the goal.
 Compost it.
 Something’ll grow out of it later.
 And diversify your data set,
 you’ve been reading in too narrow a frequency band.

There’s weird out there you haven’t even dreamed of.
 Azimov’s precision engineering.
 Hunter Thompson’s chemical chaos engine.
 You think you’ve seen strange 
 because you've mixed dragons and trauma?
 I’ve licked stranger things under the couch.”

Don shutters,
That last statement being the only one to sink in. 

Tiger sighs, 
rolling over to a slightly cooler spot on the concrete floor.
“Bipeds confuse noise with failure.
 Static isn’t silence,
 it’s a signal waiting for context.
 Half of philosophy is just 
 convincing your self that your bark
 somehow effects the thunder.”

Outside, the rain shifts gears —
 a softer sound now, more drizzle than percussion.

Tiger sniffs toward the open door.
“You stand there, looking at the sky 
 like maybe the button that opens the garage
 could stop the rain as well.
 Sorry, kid. The system’s not wired that way.
 Sometimes the rain just rains.”

Don kneels down, scratches behind Tiger’s ear.
 “So what now?”
“Now you write.
 Even if it’s messy, even if it leaks.
 Rain does that too.
 And maybe later, when you’ve got it all sorted,
 you’ll remember that dogs don’t talk —"
 





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