Vicious Little Dogs

A man in a dirty green jumpsuit and brown aviator sunglassees walks two of the smallest, most vicious-looking doogs ever. The dogs do not look downright vicious or deadly at first glance, but they project an insatiable hunger, the kind of quiet, blank rabidness one feels while being attacked by vampire bats that have had their senses scrambled by cellular signals and an unwavering invisible barrage of YouTube videos of people, desperate talking heads in twilighted blue-tinted bedrooms, lipsynching a song that is only good ironically.

One dog is on a leash. It looks like a bloated rat-kite being dragged along the pavement. The second dog looks like, and really is Mussolini, reincarnated as a tiny monstrosity. They could put dogs like this in vending machines in Japan and pass the whole thing off as an Internet hoax.

"No, these miniature dogs are not real. It was all a publicity stunt to get you to Tokyo so that we can shrink you and put you in a vending machine."

The public is bored with the same old inanimate variety. Cigarettes, sex toys, booze, bubble-gum, pulse-rifles, nano-bot cheeseburgers, we all have one. What we don't have, is one of you.

Mussolini is peeing on a wooden sign that says "Dobrovolny, Attorney At Law." Victor Dobrovolny has been trapped in the basement of his practice for two weeks. He has been taken over by a bacterium that he snagged on his vacation to the Congo, and is slowly mutating into a giant man-eating sloth. So far he has consumed his wife, who came to check up on him, and her Brussels Griffon, which kept barking even after it had been squeezed through his powerful, slimy new esophagus. Meanwhile, in the Congo, a certain kind of bird of paradise, after having brushed against Dobrovolny's head while pursuing a mate, has acquired Dobrovolny's likeness which, also being contagious, has spread to two hundred other indigenous bird species, so that 68% of all avians in the Congo now look like a middle-aged lawyer from Central Illinois.

Mussolini wonders, as he eats a frozen cicada exoskeleton in the gutter, who the other dog might be. Is it Stalin, maybe Trotsky or Zinoviev? It is definitely not Müller, but it is wearing a miniature Christmas sweater. "Why does he get a sweater," wonders the Italian dictator, "And not me?"

Past the miniature dog show walks a man with three VHS tapes that he got from the public library. The movies he got are Blow Up, The Bicycle Thief, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. He must watch Beyond Thunderdome ten times in a row, because Tina Turner has been appearing in his dreams and brainwashing him. The other two movies he got simply as background filler to watch while he sharpens his stainless steel razor-boomerang.

As they pass each other, VHS diva zombie and the micro-dog man exchange glances, the kind where you examine someone from the inside out but pretend that you are really looking nowhere at all. VHS man peers into the brown aviator glasses of his enemy, trying to distinguish the position of his eyes, wanting to gauge how they jiggle, which way they vibrate, what color they are, while wanting simultaneously to scoop them out with a wooden soup spoon, throw them into an industrial-strength blender and make one of those viral "Will It Blend" commercials with the jumpsuit's optics, maybe throw in the dogs for effect.

The man in aviators studies his opponent thusly{
job: librarian;
psychological state: on drugs;
sum total: drug addict librarian;
articles: 3 VHS tapes;
titles: unknown;
sum total: probably porno;
clothing: fades jeans, color #CCCCCC, with bleach stains, t-shirt color #669999 with unrecognizable image and text;
haircut: buzz cut;
sum total: skinhead;
grand-total: drug addict librarian skinhead porno addict.
}