I Walk My Dog Every Morning

By Drew Banton

While walking his dog one morning, an auto mechanic is approached by an intriguing stranger who makes a surprising request. He chooses to try to fulfill this request, a decision that complicates his life in unexpected ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Drew Banton
• Release date: Jan 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370507399

Drew Banton

Drew Banton has published novels, novellas and stories. He has had pieces appear in Event Horizon online magazine and Bicycling Magazine. He has worked as a printer, welder, auto mechanic, bicycle frame builder, industrial mechanic and manufacturing engineer. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. When not writing he can usually be found walking his dog or trying to keep up with his grandson.

Book preview

I Walk My Dog Every Morning

by

Drew Banton

The Industrial Strength Press

©Copyright 2017 Drew Banton

All Rights reserved

Smashwords edition

Also by Drew Banton:

A Dangerous Job

The Jack

The Gurry Room

The Mascot

The Printer's Apprentice

e-mail: [e-mail]

web: The Industrial Strength Press

Authors Note: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Start

Midpoint

End

Author

I walk my dog every morning. I doubt the woman watching me from across the street knew that. She just saw this guy who looked somewhat respectable doing the everyday, ordinary activity of walking a dog. She must’ve thought, Hmmm, there’s a person who I can walk right up to and ask a question and he probably won’t yell or call the cops or try to hurt me.

So she started to cross the street. At first, I did not consider this to be particularly unusual. I live in a part of the city where the traffic isn’t so bad that you risk death every time you step off the curb. Serious injury maybe, but not death. And I walk my dog at six thirty in the morning. The traffic is really pretty light around then. But it was a little unusual that the woman had been staring at me from across the street and was continuing to watch me as she let a bus chug by and then reached my side of the street. Not that there’s anything wrong with my looks, a few otherwise quite sane women have liked them just fine, but I don’t have the kind of looks that usually draws stares. I have more the kind of looks that grow on you as you gradually discover what a wonderful person I am.

She looked pretty good herself. I don’t get stared at very much, but I do a lot of staring. The various women who’ve passed through my life are always wanting to slap me on the head because of this habit. No amount of explanation seems to make them understand that it’s no threat to them. Women are one of the glories of the universe. Do I want to waste my few precious minutes on earth pretending not to be looking? Let them go ahead and stare at men. I don’t mind. This particular woman was worth a stare. The raw material was good. She was tall, a few inches shorter than me and slim. A good stretch of nice legs showed beneath a blue dress. She had on low high heel shoes. No doubt there is a name for that kind of shoe. Women’s shoes are not one of my specialties. She wore a leather or, more likely, fake leather brown jacket that was probably too thin for the morning because she was hugging it around herself with both arms. She had straight brown hair that just reached her shoulders. She had light brown skin that could have been a good tan but was a little too even, a little too smooth and a little too far into fall for that. So she was a woman of color, a woman of uncertain ethnic origins, a woman with ancestors from every damn part of the globe as far as I knew. Did I care? Well, yeah, it’s part of who you are, and it matters to everyone in this backward part of the world. But most of us take it into account and then get past it. By the way, my ancestors scraped the manure off their boots in various parts of Eastern Europe before they got on the boat. If you care. I have a color, too. It’s called five o’clock shadow.