Description of a Dog and Cat

Description of a Dog and Cat

	The hound’s long ears flopped down into his bowl as he lapped at the water.  The turbulence of his drinking washed flecks of dark brown kibble out of his teeth and into the bowl, while at the same time his tongue recycled bits of soggy gristle, desaturated from hours of soaking, back into his mouth.  If the hound was aware of this, he didn’t care.
His front legs looked like gnarly hardwood stumps, squat and stout and lumpy, the large front paws turned out at a near-obtuse angle.  His hind legs were more graceful, but still woefully under-proportioned to his bratwurst-like body. His legs were the only short thing about him; his velvet ears, white-flagged tail, and freckled snout were all comically long, and his skin seemed made for a dog twice his size. The skin creased around his elbows and knees, and over his flat brow as his head stooped down to his bowl. Even his nails were long, sprouting from his white paws in chaotic directions like crazy sea anemones from a coral bed.

	The little orange cat crept a centimeter closer, making sure to stay within the hound’s large and forgiving blindspot. His body was cocked almost perpendicular to the hound’s. His back and tail formed an intimidating double-hump, and his unblinking eyes were fixated on the lazily drifting tuft of unruly hair at the end of the hound’s tail. The cat was still and tense, electrostatically charged, every tawny hair on end as if some mind-boggling voltage threatened to ionize the air between his cave-like pupils and the dog’s unsuspecting rear.
	...
	The cat waited.
	The dog drank.
	…
	The cat blinked and turned its head away.
	The dog stopped drinking.
	...
	Then, triggered by who-knows-what, the cat’s gaze snapped-to like a neodymium magnet -- it jolted sideways in a brilliant arc, hopping laterally on all four paws toward the hound -- one, two, three, four stuttered hops before twisting his body to face the target, going totally airborne, body and arms like a capital Y as he soared, exposing his soft pouchy belly, utterly miscalculating his trajectory, and landing a third of the way up the dog’s long back.  The cat affixed with his fishhook claws and became a writhing fury.
Several hundred milliseconds of all-out assault elapsed atop the dog’s rounded hindquarters before he jerked his long face toward the flurry, curling semicircular to dislodge the furred nuisance. He produced a whiny groan like a scratched record and shoveled the cat off his backside with his blocky snout. The cat bailed and skipped off a few feet, then sat and licked casually at its paw.
For a few seconds the hound stood and watched the cat with droopy eyes, finally plodding off to the couch, wild nails clacking all the way. The cat eyed the frothy water with its mealy accumulation and decided to try the toilet instead.  The house went quiet once again as the pair awaited the master’s return.