I had never done any experimenting with art in my life, and I quickly held a personal mandate. I was unanimous. It was time to be creative.
I grabbed a really big watermelon from out of the garden and placed it on my patio table. Using a cleaver, I whacked at the melon for hours to see what sort of artist I really was. The finished product was a beautiful carving of a ballerina. My dog, who has been a very bad dog every single day he's been alive since birth and never deserved a toy, looked at me with sad, glistening puppy eyes. It was bizarre that he still had puppy eyes, as he was already a full grown dog. I could tell it was a guilt trip. So I gave the ballerina to my dog, and I did so with reverence as this was to be the first toy he'd ever received in his delinquent, evil life. Sure enough, as I expected an ungrateful canine like him to do, he ate it. I immediately scheduled an appointment with the dentist to have his teeth removed.
When we finally sat him in the dentist's chair, the dentist walked in and informed me of something that gave me quite a shock.
"Your dog is not a dog," he told me.
"What?" I replied, more discombobulated than I ever remember being in my life.
"That's right," he continued. "This here is a gerbil, and it looks like he's been dead for several years."
"What about the watermelon he ate?" I asked. "You're not telling me that a dead gerbil ate my beautiful watermelon ballerina!"
"No," he responded patronizingly, "you ate it and blamed it on your dead gerbil that you thought was a dog."
I had never been so embarrassed in all my life. "I have never been so embarrassed in all my life," I told the dentist.
"Oh, there's no need to be. I've made the mistake several times myself." This was very reassuring, and the dentist and I became friends instantly.
The dentist and I have hung out on my patio every night since, carving watermelon sculptures and feeding them to our dead gerbils. The ones we didn't feed to our dead gerbils are on display at the Field Museum in Chicago next to the Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo.
© 1997 kyle t.
IMPROVINOVELS
(there's like, a million to choose from)
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