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I’m sitting at a red light falling in love with the passenger in the next car. She’s cute and small and irrepressible, but mostly hidden by the headrest, and dark and coy and mysterious and of completely indeterminate age, and smart! When she turns her head just so, contemplating her driver, I can see enough, through the tinted glass and the relentless glare of the bird-stained windshield, to know she’s curious and contemplative. A brilliant browline crowns a clear and deepset eye of sparkling darkness. I feel you judging me. Love at one car distance is every bit as legitimate as love at a distance of one breath mingling with another, near enough for our tongues to snap like wit. I’ve had the skin-on-skin sort. The varsity variety. I’m not sure it was any better. I’ll catch her eye when I pass alongside, if this maddening gridlock doesn’t unhinge me. I want to tell her this traffic is the worst since cops invented red lights to raise ticket revenues, right? I know. Observations like that should win her heart unless my heart is lying. She’ll be mine to amuse and disappoint in a minute or a mile. But first, eliminate the other driver, who doesn’t deserve or appreciate her. How’s his traffic material? Green light, finally. As our cars pull even, her driver’s head blocks her from offering me her face. To pledge in my direction. With her eyes. That I am not alone in love. Her driver will concede our love is destiny, or regret it. He moves aside, I believe, in surrender; I see her; she is stunning. The most magnificent springer spaniel, dark of brow and bright of eye, purebred of champions clearly, this one, raised from greatness for greatness, vivacious and irrepressible, age approximately three.
Original Copyright © February 10, 2000
Revised Copyright © February 06, 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…