Flash Friday on Wednesday, fifteen minutes, not proof read, I might like it, I'll let you know when I read it in Flash Friday

The neighbor dog was at the end of his tether, dewclaws ticking against the chain link, barking at a squirrel up a tree. I squinted; red squirrel, bushy tail, chittering with an exaggerated overbite. The sky was so fucking blue.

“This is such a sad song, why do you listen to such sad music?”

“Don’t get confused between the lyrics and the song,” I paused a beat to remember, “Sarah.”

She made some sound, I’m sure that guys she’d been around for a while recognized it as the ‘pay attention to me now sound’. Hmmm, I recognized it as that sound, thinking about those poor other bastards was to remind myself I wasn’t going to be among their number. I was more involved tracking the squirrel for the neighbor dog. I called him Max. I hadn’t met the neighbors. I’d only been living there for two years. Max was well fed.

I turned to her, she was pretty enough to bite back the resentment at looking away from a sky so fucking blue I just wanted to bark.

“Music is supposed to make you feel . I don’t know any good music I like that’s happy music. I know passionate, patriotic, furious, spiritual music. I know blues, cry in your beer, grind your hips, toil all day in the hot sun blues, but it’s not sad. You feel what you feel and any music that makes you feel anything is good music.”

She made that sound again with another inflection that probably meant ‘I’m bored with that kind of attention tell me I’m pretty’.

I was going to say something else but I was feeling mean and bored with that kind of attention. Max’s barking became more frantic, and his tongue was dripping slobber. The squirrel had jumped down to a lower branch to chitter at Max.

“Can you do my back?” she asked.

I couldn’t help but think the conversation between bushy red and anxious Max was more meaningful. That tomorrow they would start back up where they left off. In the Autumn the squirrel would build a nest in my tree, and Max would only be let out to pee, and come back into a mud room, some impatient adult saying paw-paw over and over to wipe the wetness from his paws.

“I said can you do my back,” a beat, “Please?”

“Have you ever seen baby squirrels?”

“No, no, the other one, the spf 15. What was that?”

“Baby squirrels, have you ever seen one?”

“I don’t think so, I bet they’re cute.”

“Yeah. I don’t know, how come I’ve never seen a baby squirrel?”