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This car is too big for our abbreviated family. Dad drives, and I sit in the back where he can see me, as if I would budge, just the two of us since the accident that reduced us by half. Beside him is empty. Beside me too. He has a metaphorical way of holding the wheel at twelve o’clock with his left hand backwards like he’s prepping for a hard right or fighting a skid, like he’s shaking his fist at whatever’s ahead, ready to flip the bird. Equally newsworthy, his favorite parking space is alongside any unattended female, and every time we somehow get the checkout line with the cutest cashier. I learn what I observe, not what I’m told. It’s clever for a man his age to tell them what we’re up to, to frame himself a single dad buying game cartridges with his son. When they smile, at him, not me, he appreciates me with gum and batteries. Just once he should tell them why he’s single and who was driving if not drunk then nearly, and who was climbing over the seat to get to the front when we ran into a barricade that was meant to stay put and did. We’re survivors, Dad and I. We flew through the moon roof like superheroes side by side and into the night. I would have been belted in, like now, like Mom and Junior were. Dad never believed in them. The belts, I mean. He doesn’t look at the passenger seat. He doesn’t look at me either. But if he has to brake suddenly, which happens a lot, he reaches back to restrain Junior, when I’m the one who’s sitting here. I don’t get it. The living were always better off without Dad’s kind of protection.
Original Copyright © February 21, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 23, 2026
I hate whoever my dog hates, not just the mailman, though he’s a fine example. And not by arrangement. We naturally agree on who’s despicable. Who we love is a different story. I’ve watched Baxter gaze at other men we meet, men who don’t resemble me, as if he were thinking: If I had to be human, I’d be a standup guy, a good earner, and a generous lover, like you. For all their supposed loyalty, my dogs have always hedged their bets. Baxter loves my ex-wife, perhaps for the same reasons I do, but he also flirts with her new boyfriend, the lawyer in our endless divorce case. That’s them pulling into the driveway now. Baxter bounds to the door, knocks over the umbrella stand, whimpers, squeals. He wants them both, in his house, for a threeway. Umbrellas be damned. It’s my fault. I’ve been avoiding the mail, again, so the statute of limitations on their willingness to unmolest me has expired, again. They’ve come for signatures. Ink must be spilled, clauses initialed. We’re sitting without refreshment at a shaky card table on shakier chairs. My formerly betrothed signs papers her boyfriend wrote that codify terms he negotiated to unrelate and nullify us to her benefit. With her other hand, her fingers are making promises to Baxter’s favorite scratchy spots. How well I know those spots, fingers, promises! The boyfriend witnesses everything and embosses the stack of lies with his notary seal, press, thing. Is there nothing the law prohibits him from being? She’s gazing at him like Baxter does. I bare my fangs each time his little seal squeaks. And though he knows better than to speak now, he speaks. And when he says the words “sole custody of the pet,” I lunge, they’ll say without warning.
Original Copyright © January 19, 2007
Revised Copyright © January 25, 2026
Very Short Novels 
This is a close relative of a Very Short Novel titled Short for Family from 20 years ago. The revisions…