Shreddy and the Christmas Ghost

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Anthropomorphic Dreams Podcast, AD 049, December 2012

“Shreddy’s dreams were haunted by sparkling mouse eyes. They hung on the Christmas tree, replacing the colored lights.”

Everything was going wrong this Christmas, and the dogs were too stupid to care.

Usually, after the Feast of the Giant Bird, Shreddy and the dogs were given table scraps to eat.  As a cat and a mediocre hunter, Shreddy relished the chance to taste the flesh of an avian larger than himself.  He looked forward to it all year.  Thus, he watched in utter horror as one of the Red-Haired Woman’s dinner guests scraped all the plates off into the trash.  No taste of turkey this year. Continue reading “Shreddy and the Christmas Ghost”

Paper Woes

Printing out manuscripts to take to my writing group is way harder if I get distracted while they’re printing and don’t notice that the paper has stacked too high, causing the pages to start curling up and then flopping down in reverse order, until there’s too many to do that so they start flipping over the other side of the printer to the floor, and then they give up entirely and jam the thing up, leaving me with a jammed printer and a whole pile of out-of-order pages in varying degrees of crunch-ed-ness.

Oh, To Be a Fish

My betta fish is happy. It’s a warm day, so he’s jumping and darting about his tank. Full of energy; full of joy; swimming and being a fish.

This is what pets are for — to be small and cared for, concerned with controllable, fixable things — like whether the house is warm today.

It gives me someone in my life whose world I can make perfect and joyous, just by doing something simple like turning up the heat.