Soupçon and the Pitbull

 Soupçon Morningstar, the local human resources employee, was attacked by a Pitbull. The Pitbull’s name – appropriately enough – was Manslayer, and he lived in a house Morningstar passed just as he turned onto the country road down and back up which he walked on pleasant days such as the present one. It was autumn, and the leaves had turned already, but the sun was shining overhead, and the air was crisp in a very gentle way, like an apple best suited to the purposes of pie baking. As he passed the house, he could hear Manslayer barking and throwing himself against the screen door, but in that there was nothing unusual. Manslayer always barked and threw himself against the screen door when passersby passed by. On this occasion, however, it so happened that the dog’s owner had failed to fully latch the door upon heading out for a quick trip to the supermarket, and as a result, when Manslayer threw himself against it, it gave way.
Like a jester sprung from a jack-in-the-box, the unleashed beast came charging across the yard into the road, knocking Soupçon’s legs out from under him. Then, he stood over him, slavering from the maw, and said: “You know what your problem is, Soupçon Morningstar? I’ll tell you what it is. Let’s take a trip back in time, shall we? The summer before sixth grade. Co-ed softball practice. One day, between plays in the field, Winnie Smackpacker, the shortstop, asks you why your nostrils are so big, and how do you respond? Instead of looking her straight in the eyes and telling her that your nostrils are exactly the size of your nostrils and you’re as proud of them as you are of everything else about yourself because no matter how handsome a person may be, there’s always someone handsomer, and no matter how smart a person may be, there’s always someone smarter, but the one thing everyone is better at than everyone else in the world is being themselves, and you aren’t about to let some sassy sixth grader with a name like Smackpacker take that away from you, you improvise some bullshit explanation about how you have bad allergies that are giving you nasal congestion which is causing your nostrils to expand, as though such a thing were even plausible. I mean, the middle of summer isn’t high allergy season, for one thing, and for another, I’m not sure there’s a lot of scientific backing for the claim that nasal congestion causes the old nose holes to expand. But that’s what you go with, and then you spend the rest of the summer touching your nostrils with the tips of your fingers to make sure they aren’t getting any bigger because if they’re already so big that Winnie Smackpacker is commenting on it, well God forbid they get even bigger. Now, fast forward ten years. You’ve just started school at the Brouhaha Institute of Contemporary Clown Arts, thinking you’re about to become the next big thing in clowning, when the famous Pippa Buttercup, working at the institute for one semester as a special visiting professor, harshly critiques your first solo performance for workshop, and true though it may be that you and Pippa have distinctly different visions of the art of clowning, instead of taking from that critique what might be of value to you in the work of achieving your vision and discarding the rest, you reject it ragefully and spend the remainder of your time at the institute trying to become the opposite whatever you imagine Pippa’s platonic ideal of a clown to be, an approach that, being little more than its inverse, ultimately brings you no closer to achieving your vision than dedicating your efforts to trying to win Pippa’s approval would have, and I suppose we all know what happens to your clowning career after that, don’t we? Just another layer atop the ash heap of false starts and abandoned ambition. Two chapters from the biography of Soupçon Morningstar that in the end are really two versions of the same story, which is the story of a man who goes through life like an empty suit of armor, ducking every blow lest he be exposed as the nothing he actually is inside precisely insofar as he believes he is nothing inside, and when the rubber hits the road, that’s the reason Marmalade Whirligig, who everyone at the office has seen you making eyes at, isn’t ever going to give you the time of day. Because, to put a somewhat finer point on it, you’re nothing but a shell, whereas a woman of Marmalade Whirligig’s caliber needs a nut. A nice, crunchy nut. Anyway,” shrugged Manslayer, “that’s pretty much all I wanted to say, and now that I’ve said it, I think I’ll head back inside and recommence chewing that giant hickory-smoked beef marrow bone I’ve been working on all afternoon.”
Before he could beat his retreat, however, Soupçon leapt to his feet, fell upon him with an angry snarl, and in effort, no doubt, to fatally puncture the jugular, ended up chomping him right in the prosternum instead. At that, man and dog lay down together by the side of the road, both deeply wounded; and to make matters worse, when the veterinarian and EMT summoned by a nearby good Samaritan arrived on the scene, neither knew which of the two they were meant to take.