Doug blearily opened his eyes at the sound of the front door opening and slamming closed. Father must be home! Doug had been waiting for this moment since he left for work this morning at eight a.m. sharp, as he left every morning at the same time in the same uniform. Tail wagging ecstatically, Doug padded through the living room to greet the man at the door. The Father was a stout man of below-average height, sporting a bit of a beer belly from the amount of food he consumed. His hair was slowly deteriorating, but he kept a few small strands swooshed over his prominent bald spot in an attempt to cover it up (which he admittedly failed at doing). He pulled his work jacket off and hung it on the coat rack, which had many scratches and bite marks on it as Doug often liked to nip at the bottom of it when he was sure nobody would catch him. He barks at an eccentric and unnecessary volume, unable to contain his giddiness. Father pats the dog on the head once, walking past him with a heavy footstep into the quaint kitchen and dining room. Doug’s Mother is setting dinner food out on the small round table when the two walk in. Doug laps around her, shaggy tail wagging wildly.
“Down boy!” She snaps, causing Doug to redirect his course to chasing his tail rather than around her feet. The Mother was a tall and lanky woman, towering a good few inches over the father when she stood tall. However, most of the time she was hunched over awkwardly as if she were impersonating the Hunchback of Notre Dame, putting her just slightly above Father’s height. Mother often gets like this, using that angry voice of hers and swatting Doug away with her foot or the back of her hand. When she gets red in the face like this, Doug found it best to leave her be.
The dog spots his sister and brother fighting in the middle of the living room, knocking over things like the vase Mother always forgot to add water to, leaving the flowers wilting and dying, and a picture frame depicting their small family on a trip to Hawaii, all with toothy smiles plastered across their faces and lei necklaces hung around their necks. Doug always loved that picture and spent lazy afternoons when Mother was out of the house or weekends Brother and Sister slept in staring at that picture longingly, wishing he was with his family now. He imagined their wide smiles and twinkling eyes as they scratched behind his ears and sat around the fireplace, all incredibly happy.
When his Sister and Brother didn’t respond to their mother’s demand, the woman came stomping into the living room, the wooden ladle she used while cooking still in hand. She yelled something about wrestling in the house and listening when she talked, but Doug was more focused on the ladle than anything. How he would love to jump up and bite it!
The four walked back into the kitchen, Brother and Sister sulking behind the tall woman, Doug's eyes still locked on the spoon. His Father was already sitting comfortably at the head of the table, waiting patiently for his family's antics to die down.
“‘Bout time,” he grumbles, “I’m so starved I could literally eat a horse.” Mother mumbles something under her breath about being patient and how she does all the work around the house, while his Brother and Sister take their seats at the table on each side of their Father, as if they were in a royal court and the Father was the king, the Sister and Brother his loyal subjects. Doug places himself patiently next to his brother's chair. The boy tended to be a messy eater, dropping crumbs of food under the table which Doug accepted gleefully. The Mother loathed this habit of theirs, but that never stopped his Brother from dropping the food or Doug from eating it.
Short Stories
This excerpt of a fiction short story was written for an English class assignment in my junior year. We were meant to write a scene of a family (any family, whether ours or fictional) in Franz Kafka’s style of writing, specifically in The Metamorphosis. I chose to write about a fictional broken family from their dog’s optimistic perspective.