Myrtle, the Obnoxious Ghost Roommate: The New Puppy
Get a dog, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.
I have never seen an animal so happy to be adopted. And when I first brought him home, that lab-mix puppy adored me. Until Myrtle.
When he ran out of the kennel into the house, the little chocolate lab puppy needed to sniff everything that his twitchy black nose could reach. But only in the same room I was in. For the first week, that dog followed me every time I got up. He would sit and cock his head at me while he watched me take a piss. When I cooked dinner, he’d lay at my feet next to the stove. If bits of food landed on the floor, he would pop up and snatch it with his tongue before I had a chance to take it away. As I ate, he literally gave me the puppy dog eyes waiting for his share of my dinner.
Myrtle had a problem with me bonding with the puppy.
After a couple of weeks, the puppy wasn’t following me around anymore. At first, I wasn’t concerned – I figured he’d gotten comfortable in his new home. But one day, I’m walked out of the kitchen, and I hear the puppy bouncing up the basement steps. I always keep the basement door closed. The puppy walks past without acknowledging me and starts scraping at the backdoor. I opened the door so he can take a shit in the yard. The puppy never looked at me.
Ignoring me was phase one. Phase two was open hostility. The puppy changed from leaving a room when I entered to growling and bearing his teeth at me. I had to leave the kitchen after I set the puppy’s food down so he would eat. Opening the back door to let him piss or shit in the yard became a dance to keep him from drawing blood. A walk around the block was out of the question.
I still wonder how Myrtle turned that happy, doting puppy against me. She’s the anti-christ dog whisperer.
But she had beaten me. I had to take the wiggly, black puppy back to the shelter. I had named him Buddy. I shouldn’t have bothered.