A Whisper In the Wind
Dylan Marks woke up at precisely 6:46 am, every morning.
It wasn’t some kind of fluke of nature, but more appropriately, it was the time he felt was a good medium between getting up too early and hating his life, and a desperate scramble out the front door in absolute shambles.
Surely, he could have picked 7:00 but that would have given him too little time to get dressed, make coffee, take care of the pups, and be out the door in time to beat the minimal traffic in his little town, so, a happy medium seemed for the best.
That Saturday however, he opened his eyes, flipped over and dragged his blaring phone over, dismissed the alarm, and blinked blearily at the wavering wallpaper of his phone. It was a psychedelic print that rippled when you moved it, he had just downloaded it the day before and vowed on the spot to change that immediately. It was a little much for his brain and eyeballs first thing, that was for damned sure.
However, the second, the micro-moment that his head popped up, three other sets of eyes zeroed in on him, he heard the sudden frantic wild clatter of paws and toenails clack-a-lackin' across the hardwood and was suddenly confronted with two pairs of dark brown eyes and one set that looked almost feral they were so golden.
They were respectively, his two Golden Retrievers, Molly and Moxy, and his fostered male Husky, Germany. He hadn't named Germany; the husky had come with that one to the shelter, but Dylan knew his previous owner had been a real piece of work. The least of his sins had been naming a husky, "Germany", that was for sure.
Germany had come in haggard as hell, beat to smithereens, underweight by over twenty pounds, and for a dog his size, he had lacked not just the poundage but all that beautiful silver, tan, and white fur that made his breed so hard to maintain. What little he had had, had been a matted, barren nightmare of filth.
His owner had been some dipshit in the high mountains, had kept him tied to a tree his whole life, and Germany had come in with about ten other rescues after their vet check-up into the humble little non-kill Shelter he was employed at.
You want to talk about love at first sight?
Germany had set those golden eyes on him, and Dylan had stared back at him with wide blue ones, and swear to God, they had run at each other like two lost lovers separated by time and space.
However, Dylan had told himself firmly, and with much gusto that he would simply foster Germany, as long as his girls liked him, and would put out feelers for a good match-up and hopefully responsible owner, and after that, that was it.
No more dogs for him.
Fostering was a double-edged sword every time. Germany was his fourth one in three years, and every time it was harder and harder it felt, to let them go off into the unknown.
Home checks, and whatever else aside, he always felt like he was sending his children off to boarding school, and it crushed his stupid little heart every time they went slinking out the door to a new home after they had just settled in and gotten comfortable in his house.
The problem was, was that Dylan really couldn’t do it long, long-term. If he adopted every single rescue and stray that came in, he’d be overrun and overwhelmed. Already Cara at his job had six dogs, three cats, chickens, and one flippin’ duck. Thomas had three horses on top of his four dogs, and a barn full of cats, and Dylan wasn’t even going to mention their on-staff vet Patricia who came rolling through the doors with a grand tally on hand of a full farm of rescues.
Admirable, notable, and amazing, but Dylan didn’t understand how Patricia and Thomas afforded it on their salary. He had a suspicion it had a lot to do with the fact that they were both married to people who made good money, but Dylan was just little ol’ lonely Dylan, and he wasn’t raking in the cash. How Cara managed was beyond him.
But short-term fostering he could do.
The other issue he was having was that Germany was a large dog, he was a loud dog, chalked full of hard-to-maintain fur, and was considered a high-maintenance breed. He wasn't a good candidate, for example, for an old frail woman who couldn't get him out to run his energy off, he couldn't live in an apartment for the same reason, and they had had no idea how he was with cats, kids, or anything really.
Other dogs Dylan had gambled with, and Germany was fine with the girls but he couldn't guarantee he'd be great with the rest of it and Dylan didn't want to lie about it. Then he might doom the poor guy to come right back to the Shelter and that kind of cycle fucking sucked.
So, all that said and thought, he pushed up with a muttered curse, rolled to his feet, and hit a stagger for the bathroom. All three dogs clattered after him excitedly, and he didn’t bother shutting the door on them, just let them prance hungrily around his bare feet while he took a piss and tried like hell not to splash any of the nosy bastards snuffling around the tiny room.
Getting anywhere was always a debacle, and he had to step over the excited wagging everything that was Molly's wriggly body, almost tripped over Moxy darting between his legs to beat him to the door, and Germany just stared at him with eager expectation to make shit happen swiftly; outside, food, treats, walk, pet me, a howling festival for playtime, and then a complete lack of personal space on the couch in time for the entertainment news at nine o’clock.
Happy Saturday.
Dylan made it to the sink, flipped the water on, and found he looked tired; more than usual.
At twenty-eight, he was feeling...he didn’t know. Something had been keeping him up at night lately. He didn’t know if it was because he had quit drinking recently or if maybe he was finally feeling the burn of breaking it off with his previous partner.
At the time, eight months prior, Dylan had been so mad he hadn’t bothered to take any time to actually mourn the two-year relationship. He had left in a furious, jilted huff instead, blown out the door like a wayward wind cursing Scott's name, and hadn't let himself do more than be angry about the situation.
For eight months it felt like he had lived in angst, crushing betrayal, and fed his days by refusing to acknowledge that at the end of it...the guy had just really crushed him. Had made him feel like a fool, and made him hurt on a level he hadn't ever experienced before that travesty.
He had really thought that Scott was his person. Two years in, and Dylan had been so happy with the guy; he really had been. He had been picking out rings damn near, window shopping venues for their wedding day, plotting where they could vacation for their honeymoon. Literally with his head in the clouds, and blind to everything right under his nose.
Scott was a lawyer, at a small firm in their quiet northern Californian town of Sugar Lakes, had made great money, loved to travel, and on paper, he had seemed like a perfect catch.
Scott had the beautiful home, the great supportive family; his mother Talia had loved Dylan, and his sister Miranda had been hilarious and as excited as Dylan had been contemplating matrimony. That family had really filled in a lot of the holes missing in his own life, and his own strained history with his family, that was for certain.
And then one day, Dylan had gotten off work early after a particularly rough cold that had just wiped him out that week and stopped at the CVS to grab some cold medicine.
Across the street from CVS in Sugar Lakes, there was a small Italian place called Mariano’s, a new age flower/head shop called Blooms and Shrooms (It was Northern California, don’t ask) with a neon rainbow sign proclaiming its oddities and wares, and a higher end bar called Merchants Square.
The latter was where all the white-collar boys went to unwind after a long day at dentist offices or whatever else was white-collar in town, but this particular day, Dylan had pulled up and frowned seeing Scott’s beamer parked in the side lot.
Had Dylan not stopped he would have never seen it, and that knowledge had sort of haunted him honestly. It stalked him to know that if he had not gotten sick that particular week, and hadn't decided to grab some Dayquil, that even now he might have been oblivious as hell and living a stupid lie with some idiot playing him like a fiddle.
That day had hurt him so badly.
Dylan stopped on that thought and swallowed around his toothbrush before shaking it off. He was thinking that in the current time of "now", his poor sleeping habits could have been from anything; maybe the abrupt upswing of clubbing down in Sacramento he had taken up after the breakup, followed immediately by the cold turkey come-down three months prior.
Or maybe the real fact of the matter was, was that he just slept like shit when he didn’t have another body in his bed anymore.
He didn’t know, but what he did know for sure was that he was lonely, and coming home to the dogs just wasn’t the same as coming home to a person. Maybe, the solution was pretty simple; maybe he was ready to actually play the field for keeps again.
Sure as hell he had rebounded happily enough but that hadn’t made him happy beyond just the night in question.
He put his toothbrush up, sighed, and ran a brush through his wild dirty-blonde hair before forcing a smile at his reflection and thought, “fake it until you make it, Dylan.”
Then it was the odyssey of tripping with three dogs down the steps of his small house, scrambling in a fight towards the back door, and cursing God when Moxy almost took him down on the way to the sliding glass doorframe.
“Jesus!” He exclaimed it and almost got trampled into the glass. He barely got it wide enough before the three a-holes he shared space with exploded out into the backyard in a wild excited fluff of shedding fur and wildly amped shenanigans.
He smiled and went out with them just as the first spot of actual sun began to break over the beautiful tree line that dominated the area beyond the fence line.
Dylan loved his neighborhood. It was older, and he was about a block down from the oldest cemetery in town. Most people around him were younger families, older couples, and the occasional new mover in and out of the single rental duplex on this street.
Foothills surrounded the area here, and Sugar Lakes was so named for the twin set of jewel blue lakes that sat right outside of town, and his neighborhood was about a mile from the nearest one, Lake Franklyn.
The area was high in the foothills, pine-rich, and his neighborhood was in a little section of County called Twin Lake Front, even though they weren’t even close to being Lake Front anything.
It was beautiful, serene despite having neighbors, and each house on the block had about a half-acre of fenced-in land per parcel. Great for pets, kids, and BBQ season.
And his dogs loved it.
He watched the three of them rush around, happily frolicking in the new morning Spring frost. Dylan looked up when the first rays of sunshine began to shed over the foothills and spread like a warm pastel symphony over the valley below. It cast the clouds around it into rich hues of pinks, magenta, and deeper purples farther away from the sun's influence.
For a wild moment, the light hit the clouds in a golden wash right in front of him in such a way, that he swore, it looked like a dog in profile. From the eye to the lulling tongue poking out on one side, it reminded him so strongly of Germany he actually frowned at the cloud formation suspiciously.
He sighed, rubbed his forehead, and had to laugh before saying out loud, “I’m not in the mood to believe in signs and see things today, Universe. Thanks though.” He chuckled at his own whimsy there but had a real moment when a wind kicked, and it seemed to him that a cloud that looked suspiciously like fingers drifted over toward the Germany-shaped canine in the sky.
It ran through it like a creepy vaporous stroke through fur before scattering the entire mirage into nothing but golden tendrils and pink harmony once more.
He frowned, whistled for the dogs, and turned back to go get them fed.
Huh. Weird though.
