The Sweetest Little Thing

He did not doubt that the cigarette had some sway in his seeing the little dog as a tumor, some sort of cancer, growing from the man’s arm. 

Its enormous, black and weepy eyes, bulging from the rolls of its overfed blonde body, the snarl of its pink and opened mouth. Not much of a leap, with the cigarette trailing smoke so near to its head.

Midway up the parking aisle, grocery list in hand, he had heard the dog, yapping. As always, he slowed to scan the car-filled lot, thinking he’d find a perked ear face pressed against nose printed glass, warning barks escaping like frightened birds through windows left cracked for ventilation. 

Instead, he found the dog leaning, paws and all, out of the opened driver’s side window of a vehicle approaching almost immediately behind him. 

The vehicle was that sort of grey-blue sedan that one immediately recognizes as ‘American Made’, if not by the fact that you cannot recall its being manufactured, then simply by its four doors and mass. The kind of vehicle that will slow shark about a parking lot for hours, propelled by the most minimal use of its dull witted muscle, searching for that nearest spot, that next opened handicap space in which to come to rest, motor idling thickly as one passenger stays behind, waiting for the other's return, a prescription filled.

The driver’s arm was cocked out of the sedan’s opened window, and in the crook of it, lay the dog, semi-contained and barking angrily with no apparent intent or direction. Holding between his fingers a newly lit cigarette, the driver had somehow managed to bring the smoking hand around the fat little dog so that the cigarette hung now beside the yapping dog’s left ear.

It looked like an open wound, the seep of its eyes, wet black stains beneath its blue glossed eyes, the grey-pink flesh of its snarled gums. The driver, the passenger, oblivious to the dog, searched for an opened place to park. 

‘How adorable,’ he heard the voice of some passerby say, two girls who had spotted the cancerous dog. 

‘Just the sweetest little thing.’
   
     The sweetest little thing.