Something is going on the past few weeks. It all started with a smell. It smelled like camping. Then one day the sun came up and I discovered that someone had gone through and erased the world. All the nearby stuff was still there, but anything in the distance had been erased leaving nothing but a smudgy grey-white in its place. Around the same time, the people started disappearing off the streets. Usually when Mom and I go for a walk we see lots of people; even when we’re running in the dark there are plenty of other people around. But suddenly all the people were nowhere to be seen.
Then one day, the people were replaced by aliens. Everywhere we went, there were human-like monsters in the street with things covering their faces. At first the bottom half of their faces were covered with things that looked like the giant macaroni shells that doctors wear over their faces on TV. But soon they molted the macaroni shells and grew fancy faces in all different colors of grey and with one or two little breathing holes. Most monsters had one breathing portal in the middle like a mouth, but some of the monsters had two big portals on either side like tusks had fallen out. One night I saw one of the tuskless monsters running with a dog. I thought that they were chasing me, and I barked like I’d never barked before. I scared them off and they kept running to find somedog else to attack, but it took a long time for me to settle down after that and I barked into the air the whole way home, just in case.
That was in the beginning, but pretty soon there were so many monsters that I stopped barking at them and hardly noticed them anymore.
And then I realized what was going on. I was starring in a science fiction movie, obviously! It was the only thing that made sense. With my sleek muscles and handsome face, I had the perfect looks to be an action star. The movie was about aliens that land in a handsome dog’s Special Camping Place. The aliens burn the Special Place, and then they go around erasing all the mountains and the trees that he loves so much. Then, finally the aliens erase all the people and start walking around on the sidewalks now that they’ve achieved world domination. But they don’t realize that the Handsome Dog and his human have survived, and it’s their job to get the world back to normal… but how???
Mom is the dummy in the movie that doesn’t notice dangerous things and is always getting into dangerous situations. She never reacts when there’s a sound in the neighborhood at night, and thinks nothing of letting the mail man in the front gate to murder us. So I don’t think that she even realized that we were in a science fiction movie where the air smelled, the world was disappearing, and all the humans had been replaced by aliens. She kept living like the world wasn’t coming to an end; waking up every morning and saying, “Yesterday was bad, but I bet it’s blown out by now so I guess we can go out and run.” So every morning we would run in the dark and feel fine. Then the sun would come up all red like in an apocalypse movie, and we would see that the world had gotten even smaller as more and more of the distance was erased. And then Mom would say something like, “We were actually breathing this???” as she drove to work like everything was normal.
Since it was a movie, it was all make believe, and that’s why it didn’t actually hurt us to breathe the poison air. But I guess Mom didn’t realize it was all pretend because today she did her long run on the dreadmill watching true crime documentaries. It was the boringest scene in a movie ever. I know because I had to watch the whole thing, and fell asleep a bunch of times in the middle. I felt like Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a movie about an old man who thinks he’s starring in a macho sports movie with a pretty lady, and then 3/4 of the way through he finds out that it’s actually an artsy drama movie and he’s so disappointed that he cries in a very unmanly way. I ran around the house barking a lot to keep the plot interesting, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a box office flop.
Oscar the action star