Fiction Fix Sixteen

Cathleen Calbert
Man Loves Woman Loves Dog
Eve tipped back a glass to let an ice cube slip between her lips. Then she got down
on her knees before me and slid the square of ice to one side of her mouth in order to
mumble, “Check this out.” The ice emerged between her lips, which I’d not yet kissed.
Petey, also known as “the Peanut,” leaped up, pressed his flat face to hers, his flat black
lips to hers, and took the ice from her mouth. After a triumphant glance at me, the Shih
Tzu ran off, crunching his prize, and Eve smiled as if it were my turn to say something.
“Cute,” I tried, shaking my head as if I couldn’t get over the cuteness.
“He loves ice,” she told me.
“Well, sure,” I said.
We’d met a few hours earlier at a party thrown by mutual friends. Lee and Marty
had invited more people than could fit into their pink-walled house; that and a cauldron
of sangria on their patio helped to turn the gathering into one of those sweaty gettogethers
that ends with arguments or sex. Eve and I hadn’t argued yet, so I was hoping
for the sex.
Now her face rose to meet mine. She wanted to . . . press those dog-flavored lips
against my own. There are decisions one has to make in life. Are you going to be the kind
of man who tells a woman she should brush her teeth before you’ll kiss her or the kind
who gets laid? I held my breath and went where the Peanut had gone before me.
And so I was not only laid but soon in love. Here’s what I loved about Eve: her
lips, her laugh, her wit, her ass, her easiness, her earlobes, her smell, her skin, her sense,
her friends, her kindness, her clitoris, and her love of me. Here’s what I didn’t love: the
Peanut.
There are other major dividing lines: between the dead and the living, the rich and
the poor, people who are crazy about their pets and those who are in their right mind.
My new love, sadly, stood on the wrong side of that last line. Personally, I’d never thought
we were meant to share our domestic space with other species. Why live with animals
when we could just keep them in the barn until we eat them?
14 Fiction Fix