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WELCOME BACK, EVERYONE
BARYN
“Mother, I told you I don’t have much time to talk this—”
“But, Bear. I am just so excited that you’re finally getting your yoga certification after all this time. Won’t you at least flip your camera around and show me what it’s like there?” My mother cuts me off.
She’s holding my dog right up against her cheek.
She agreed to watch him while I was out of town. Looking at him now, all seven pounds of papillon pressed against her face while he attempts to lick directly through her cornea, I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.
When I talk about my dog, people tend to expect a bigger breed. Something with a blocky head and a name that sounds good yelled across a junkyard.
Instead, I have Little Lord Fauntleroy—or Faun, when he isn’t wearing a sweater he didn't ask for.
Faun was not an intentional acquisition.
I found him three years ago under a car in the parking lot of a gas station.
Technically, I heard him first. This horrible, high-pitched screaming coming from beneath someone’s vehicle that made me think I’d stumbled onto either an injured animal or an exceptionally small murder victim.
I spent twenty minutes lying facedown on hot asphalt trying to coax him out.
He spent twenty minutes making it clear he’d rather die.
Eventually, I bought a bag of beef jerky from inside the gas station and started negotiating.
It took another fifteen minutes and most of the bag before a filthy, trembling creature with ears approximately twice the size of the rest of him crawled close enough for me to grab.
He bit the shit out of me.
Obviously, I took him home.
We went to the vet. No chip. He was underweight and dehydrated, but otherwise fine. I filed a found-dog report with the county shelter, posted his picture online, checked missing-pet pages. The responsible things you’re supposed to do when you find somebody’s dog underneath a Honda.
For the first few days, I kept expecting someone to call. Faun had stopped hiding whenever I stood up too quickly. He followed me from room to room.
I’d go to take a shower and hear him crying on the other side of the bathroom door like I’d been drafted to war.
He started sleeping in my bed around then, which wasn’t intentional. I fell asleep reading with him on my chest and woke up at two in the morning with him wedged beneath my chin, snorting into my throat. I moved him to the foot of the bed out of fear of squishing him, which led to the ongoing cycle of him coming back and me forcing him back down there.
Eventually I accepted that one of us had considerably more stamina than the other.
Then the shelter called.
They’d found him a placement. A rescue had space. They could take him that afternoon, and if I brought him by before five, they’d handle everything from there.
I looked down. Faun was asleep against my thigh, one enormous ear flipped inside out, his tiny front paw resting on my leg.
Naturally, I told them I’d found his owner.
Simon, my sound guy, is currently vibrating in the passenger seat. He’s trying to hold in a giggle, which is a structural impossibility for a guy built like a high-end refrigerator. It’s a sight to behold—six-foot-plus of solid muscle shaking with the effort of staying silent.
Simon is technically here to pull cable and check sound levels, but mostly he’s my best friend and resident human vault. He communicates almost exclusively in nods and pointed silences, usually because his brain is busy plotting out the third act of whatever murder mystery novel he’s currently writing.
It’s a weird dynamic, but it works. I do the talking, he does the looming, and in between, he dreams up fictional homicides that are probably way more organized than the mess we’re currently knee deep in.
