I set out on my morning walk with the dog – the same routine as always (what other kind of routine is there?) – pee on the front lawn by the road (the dog, not me), first by the granite boulder on the east side of the lot, then by the pole that supports the basketball hoop on the west side of the lot.  Up went the hind leg, then out came a stream of deep yellow fluid.  The dog is a standard poodle, the runt of the litter and smaller than you’d expect for a standard poodle.  I call him a substandard.  When we brought him home last year, the kids named him Brutus.  In fact it was James who named him.  Jessica was barely talking then.  The most she could manage was a slurred “Bus, Bus.”

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Mohammed had been sitting outside on a rock for about a thousand years when Youssef pushed his way from the tent to join his brother.  For nearly a hundred years, Mohammed had been waiting on the rock while Youssef deflowered virgin number seventy-two, taking her every-which-way his imagination would allow.  In the sand at his feet, Mohammed was using a stick to draw letters and figures, while he listened to the grunting and groaning, screaming and moaning, biting and panting.  Sometimes, while watching a passing caravan or grinning at the vulture who hunched and returned his grin, Mohammed would lean back and yell:  “Youssef!  Youssef!  Have you not had enough of her?”  In a way, he didn’t mind Youssef’s nonsense.  Without the sound of bombs detonating in the distance, or the burst of machine gun spray, the silence sometimes drove Mohammed to the brink of madness, so it was a relief to hear his brother’s noisy exertions.

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If you’re gonna rat me out to my boss then you can just go fuck yourself. And besides … there’s no way on god’s green earth I’ll ever tell you what I’m doin’ home on a weekday watchin’ the Maury show. Oh ya, there’s Springer too. And I’m praisin’ the lord god almighty for inventin’ the remote so’s I can flip from one t’other. I’ve got this beauty of a flatscreen I’ve mounted on the wall in my den with a bar fridge in the corner and my favourite sofa plunked square in front of everything so’s I can just lie there and watch and when I get thirsty I can reach over to the fridge and pull me out a can of somethin’ cold. Today’s the perfect day for this – warm enough so’s you can leave the window open and even enjoy a cool one now and then, but not so warm as you’d work up a sweat. Don’t want my sweat to mess up my favourite sofa. Funny how’s you can get attached to somethin’ like a piece of furniture. There’s nothin’ fancy about the sofa; in fact, I bet you’d never find anythin’ like it at the Art Shoppe – though I’ll never be absolutely sure seein’ as I pulled it from the garbage two streets over. They could’ve bought it from the Art Shoppe and just decided to change their decoratin’ scheme. Doesn’t matter where it come from anyhows. It’s mine now.
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What can I say? It was a busy morning. I had to cram three hour-longs in before eleven so I could take the conference call with the boys on the coast. There were closings to close and openings to open and letters to let. There were negotiations with recalcitrant jerks, getting to yes with a push and a shove, and shouting matches with dumb-ass fence-sitters who wouldn’t know their own best interest if it waltzed up and kicked them in the teeth. Marianne, my secretary (I mean my administrative assistant), had been in and out a dozen times with documents for me to sign. In the midst of all this a man in a uniform burst into my office forcing me to cup my hand over the phone. He was a solidly built black man with a patch over his right eye and he leaned heavily on a walking stick. Marianne poked her head out from behind the man: “I’m sorry sir. I told him he had to make an appointment but he wouldn’t listen.”

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