NaNoWriMo Short Story 2: The One With Toby

It was going to be a long day.

Toby wandered around the dark house, wondering why no one had fed him yet. There were mere millimetres of food in his dish. Almost completely gone! He’d starve if someone didn’t wake up soon. 

Ignoring a sleeping Cali (how could he chase her if he didn’t have the energy because there was no food?), Toby trotted up the stairs, trying to move as quickly as possible while at the same time reserving his precious energy stores. This wouldn’t work if he ran out of calories on his way to getting fed. He’d be skin and bones and not much else. It was bad enough his food was restricted in the first place, forcing him to go through this every day. 

The dog-thing was sleeping at the top of the stairs. Toby took a sniff. The dog-thing always had this strange odour, as if she never cleaned herself at all. Disgusting. Toby stared at the sleeping face that was almost as big as his whole body (how weird!), and took a peremptory swipe at the soft back nose. Better to be safe, in case the dog-thing suddenly decided to get ideas above her place and attack first.

The dog-thing raised her head, whimpering. She stared at Toby. Toby stared back. After a few seconds the dog-thing tucked her nose back under her paws and closed her eyes. 

Toby felt victorious. 

Tip toeing around the dog-thing, Toby headed to the room where the servants slept.

There was snoring coming from the bed. Typical. The secants were waiting for the black box to make noise and wake them up, instead of waking up when they knew that he had to be starving. So rude.

Toby jumped up onto the bed. The one male servant kept snoring. The female servant rolled over, almost knocking him off the bed.

Impertinence!

Toby walked up the length of the bed, perturbed. This just wouldn’t do. One day the servants would have to figure out who was boss.

Stopping inches away from the female servant’s face, Toby did the best thing he could think of to wake the female servant. He head butted her chin. Hard. He was going to have a headache (on top of extreme and deadly hunger!), but he would worry about that later. 

The female servant opened her eyes. “Oh, good morning, Toby!”

Toby tried to tell her about the hunger and the starving and the wasting away.

“Of course we can have a snuggle!” she said, petting his head, and scratching under his chin.

Toby began to argue about the hunger.

But the scratching felt so nice.

He resigned himself to dying a horrible death, as he enjoyed the scratches and the snuggles, purring so that everyone would know that he was just putting up with this for as long as he and to.

Someday, he would win this battle. Maybe tomorrow.

The Elephant in the Room

I'm writing short stories for NaNoWriMo again this year. Here is story 1, from a prompt by my friend Pauline.

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David's dreams had been strange, stranger than liver wurst and buttermilk could ever explain. Someone hd been trumpeting during an earthquake, and the smell that had resulted from the ground opening up beneath him was too horrible to describe. 

That scene in Holiday Inn had totally lied about the foods that created dreams of beautiful women.

Rolling over, David whacked his nose soundly against something large, warm, and putrid.

He was pretty sure he'd been alone last night. Bringing a girl home after eating liver paste wasn't easy, and he was pretty sure that he still wouldn't have brought one home that smelled this bad.

Slowly, he brought a hand up and patted the bed beside him.

He met with the same large, solid object as his nose had.

Refusing to take a deep breath because of the smell, David slowly and deliberately opened his right eye. All he could see was a wall of grey. 

Struggling to remember if the buttermilk had tasted like someone had slipped a mickey into it, David opened his left eye. 

A large brown eye stared back.

David blinked.

The large brown eye winked back.

The next thing David knew, he was on his feet, tangled in bedding, back to the wall of his small room.

Staring at an elephant.

David fainted.

When he awoke, he was laying tangled in a duvet on the floor, alone.

His bed was a pile of splinters.

A strong odour permeated the room as David ran, quietly, out the door.