water and dog do mix

Rescued in the truest sense.

We had our Siberian Queen-of-you-all Husky and our German Shepherd Dog running in the field. A car stopped on the highway, and an elderly couple asked if one of our dogs got away. They had just spotted one across the highway. Injured. But not ours.

My son and I searched twice before this burly white dog stuck her head above the tall grass between the highway and the railroad track. We weren’t sure what got her—truck or train—but it had mangled one hind leg. Compound fractures. Bloodied. Shattered.

I crept toward this wounded animal, hands out to my sides, speaking softly—

And she rolled onto her back. Rub my belly. My leg hurts.

She never snapped, growled or grumbled as we loaded her up and searched for her owner. Finally, we brought her home. Took her to a vet (several times). And welcomed her into our family.

We named her Nixie. Found out her original name was Ghost. So it fit. German for water pixie. Or water nymph. Or mermaid. It really, really fit.

Nixie loves puddles after a rain. Loves her doggy wading pool. Loves the mini-donkey trough where she dunks herself almost daily. She drinks with her entire snout immersed, like how a bloodhound flushes its nose. I want to take her to the ocean. She’d spin circles. It’s mine—ALL MINE!

The sweetest of our doggies. The vet said if we weren’t keeping her, there were five people ready to take her home. No, thanks. We love her. Gimpy. Tripod. Nixie-bear.

jumping off a perfectly fine diving platform without a parachute

I should have heralded this from a canyon lip a year ago. The wonderful Abyss & Apex Magazine published my Flash Fiction story 1000 M Diving Finals about a synchronized diving team in an event made possible by wearable tech.

Find it in the ARCHIVES for 2019 under Issue 71 in the Flash Fiction section. It’s approx. 1100 words. A quick read at terminal velocity in a Speedo.

A one-kilometer dive? Yes; Douglas Adams was a favorite back in High School. All those Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels might have impressed on me.

On the surface, 1000M is about gold and love. At the deeper end of the pool is the question: Can we be our best when bolstered by fans on always-connected instant-feedback social media? Our diving duo, Tani and Nico, have different ideas about that.

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Pictured: The scenic train at the bottom of Royal Gorge in Colorado. I snapped the shot from the lookout while trying to catch pictures of my daughter and niece on the climbing tour.

It struck me how the train looks like a toy, a thousand feet below, with the cliff wall out of focus providing a striking depth of field. Even the terrain behind the train looks like something carved by a master model train builder.

I used it for this post because the pool in 1000M would be about 3 times farther down.