Below is a short story I've been working on, it is kind of evolving out of memories from my childhood and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the last peices of fiction that I read that I felt really affected me, but ones that I was a little ashamed to be reading so late in life. I guess this story is a way for me to read those stories in my own childhood. The second and third paragraphs are what I've been working on most recently and they have added a softening kind of realism to the piece that initially strayed into a darker Russian absurdism. I impressed myself to no small degree by how similar my initial story reminded me of the Russian stories of imagination.

Some time ago lived a man who owned a dog. His dog was a kind of present from his wife.

Before they were engaged her father died and when she heard the news he was there. Sitting across from her and they studied together for their end of term exams. She put her hands in her face and crumpled into the library bathroom. He hung on the frame as the other soon-to-be graduates pushed passed, eyeing him with ignorance, he knew, and ready-made contempt.

She dropped out of school before she could take her exams and went to live with her mother, who was all alone. The man called her on the phone a lot in the beginning and less as the weeks dragged on. He graduated and asked her if she still wanted to move-in together like they had planned to and took a job at *

But he dare not ask lest she think him ungrateful, because the dog, even when he got it, was just a walk in the park from fully grown.

The man worked as a middle manager for * a computer software company. She still wanted to move in with him she said and she wanted to move out of her father’s house, not liking the strange orbit her mother had fallen into after the passing of her father.

He didn’t know how to make software for computers but he knew how to use software and sell it to people who didn’t know how to do either, and his employees knew this, and so did his bosses. The only person that he could think of who didn’t know this was his son who sat across from him at the dinner table.

His son didn’t know that this man who wore gel in his hair and dressed in a suit every day and moved his mother out of the way by the hips was his father. It had always seemed natural to him that the dog was his father. Every afternoon the boy and the dog would play fetch and his dog would jump on his chest and tell him how much he loved him. When he learned the truth he was disappointed, and felt a calcified disbelief rise in him despite the ringing sense his mother’s cackling admonition had made. She pushed the dog off her bed with the boy and he went to go see his father to be sure.

© 2023 Jeremy Andrew