Day One Hundred Eighty-four, in Which a Host Family Appears

The dog watched parabolic meat with listless eyes and I realized my host mother was not a liar: (a) BuBu (sic) was, improbably but implacably, a vegetarian. Or at least a lapsed carnivore. One of four dogs, the others being

(b) Michi (sic, again), a porcine tan-piebald fat-roll-segmented grass-torpedo desperately, sadly masquerading as some variety of pug, lest his (doubtless subchordate, poor thing) true genus lend him brutal and swift excommunication,

(c) [name omitted], a low-slung unmnemogenic creature of the lapsed sheep-hound stripe but no literal stripe, only somewhat harassed I-am-brushed-perhaps-more-often-than-is-necessary lank dark blue-black parallel strands of wisp-tipped hair, and

(d?) [name omitted], a being that, as the hours seep past, I am beginning to suspect was created the moment my host brother (disinherited of his mother’s forthright nature, sorry bud) said We. Have. Four. Dogs., meaning, of course, something other than this, or perhaps meant to be closely followed by a caveat (“one is dead”) that was abandoned in a moment of internal fourteen-year-old knee-knocking, leaving our fourth item somewhat stranded, ontologically so, roaming only my headspace (no fences, rather unkempt), barking uncertainly at passing thoughts, worrying about neural fleas, possibly passing into aether at the fall of Damocles’ clarification, Damocles’ additional-polite-query-regarding-your-nonhuman-domestic-charges.

There are also three people and two cats.