Short Story: Found

The Great Substack Prompt Celebration

To stretch my short fiction muscles, I’m taking part in Fictionista’s Great Substack Prompt Celebration. This month’s prompt: Your dog has dug a large hole in your backyard and is losing their mind about what’s inside. You look in the hole and know instantly that you will be on the news.

I never wanted a dog. The dog found me.

I’m standing on the patio of my tiny apartment, thinking of how I’ll have to say goodbye soon, when I see her: a dachshund, buried up to the middle of her brown sausage body, her short hind legs scrabbling in the dirt of a recently planted flower bed.

“Hey! Hey stop that!”

The dog wriggles out of her tunnel, her pink collar and silky brown snout stained red from the clay. She tilts her head, ears flopping and blinks her black button eyes, as if to say, “Who me? I didn’t do it!”

“Stop,” I hiss, crouching down. “You’ll get us both in trouble.”

The apartment’s management just planted these new hydrangeas. If they find holes and ruined flowers on the lawn in front of my unit, they’ll think this dog is my responsibility, my problem. And they’ll know I’m still here when I’m supposed to be long gone. A new tenant will arrive any day now. Every knock on the door, every new car in the parking lot, sends me fleeing from the windows to hide.

I need more time, another week to collect myself and find a new home. But this dog will expose me.

“Shoo!” I clap and wave the pup away. “Go home!”

The dachshund whines, a pleading sound that tugs at my heart and makes me grit my teeth. Then she disappears into the hole again, digging faster, dirt flying.

I’ll call Jacob. He’ll know how to get rid of the dog, how to explain to my landlord I just need a few more days on my lease. When Jacob talks, people listen and do what he says.

My phone rings and rings and then goes to voicemail, and I remember I can’t call Jacob anymore. My hand goes to my neck, where a tiny silver heart pendant used to hang. Our promise to each other. A promise I broke when I told him I didn’t want to get married. He said he didn’t want to wait, and I said 21 was too young, and maybe we should see other people, and then he said no and grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. And the next day when I woke up, the necklace was gone.

I search my empty rooms for a treat, a toy, anything to lure this annoying hound out of the hole. But my fridge is bare, the pantry, nothing but dust. Mom cleaned it out the last time she came to visit. She helped me pack too, crying along with me as she boxed up my books and folded my favorite blanket, knitted by Grandma. “I hope it’s not cold where you are,” she whispered, stroking the pink and purple yarn.

The blanket and my books and my kitchen pans and all my clothes have gone on ahead of me. But in my closet, I find an old sock Mom forgot. Rolling it into a ball, I walk onto the patio, ready to tempt the dog with a game of fetch.

She’s disappeared.

I didn’t imagine the dog—the hole is even larger than it was a few moments ago—but there’s no sign of her long wriggling body. Not even a bark.

I whistle. “Here…girl? Here puppy!”

When there’s no answer, I sag in relief; she must have run home.

Then, as I turn to go inside, there’s scrabbling in the dirt and a yelp, and a tiny mud-caked head pops out of the hole. The dachshund shimmies the rest of her body from the ground and trots over. She sniffs my old sock and barks again, her tail wagging, as if to say, “Hi! I found you!” When she’s happy, the entire lower half of her body wiggles back and forth with joy. It’s kind of cute.

“What’s your name?” I crouch nearer, and her collar catches the sun. Rosie.

“Hey, Rosie.”

She yips another hello and does her butt-wiggle dance again, making me laugh. As I scratch her ears, the landscaping service van pulls into the parking lot and turns the corner. Crap. They’ll see the dog ruining their hard work, call the landlord and I’ll get the blame.

“Come on, Rosie. We gotta cover up this hole.” I step off my patio and into the flower bed. I try to grab Rosie by the collar to keep her from disappearing into the earth again, but she’s so wet and muddy she slips from my hands.

“Rosie, no!”

But instead of digging, she runs to the edge of the crater and barks, rough and growly. Not hello, but danger. Beware.

I tiptoe around flowers and mud puddles, kneel beside Rosie, and stroke her fur as I peer into the dark pit.

There’s my necklace. A string of silver, with a heart stained red with blood and mud, stark against a pale neck, bruised purple, yellow and green. Under the damp smell of earth, there’s the fruity, burnt-rubber odor of death.

No more hiding. There I am.

How did I end up in a hole in the ground?

“Hey! Hey, stop that! All these flowers, my boss is gonna kill me. Bad dog! Oh, shit—oh Santa María, Madre de Dios. Oh no. This is bad, this is real bad.”

The landscape worker runs away, a cell phone already pressed to his ear.

Soon, the police will arrive. Then the news vans. And my mom. I’m going to be on TV, Mom. Please don’t cry. Maybe one day, after they pull me from the ground, exhume my story, find out who wrote The End, I’ll get to go home again.

But for now, it’s just me and Rosie. I bend to scratch her ears, and she yelps and wriggles with delight. “That’s right,” I say. “Good dog. You found me.”