Dog Bite

She figures that the hospital is like an airplane; you can tell your bedmate anything and never see her again. Between them, a paper curtain pushed open.

“What are you in for?” asked the wrinkled woman in the smooth white bed.

“Stupidity. Thievery. You can ignore an alarm, but a dog is unpredictable.”

“What’d you get?”

“Amethyst earrings and a leg torn open.” She meant to show the old lady pictures, but she couldn’t find her phone. “What about you?”

“Retired agent, pancreas.”

The cry of a Cooper’s hawk, 12 stories up. A nurse rushes in, followed by a cop.

Alisa Golden’s work has been published in The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Transfer, Generations, Kaleidotrope, and The Monthly.

Photo credit: Elsa

2 Responses to “Dog Bite”

  1. Mark Bacon says:

    A first sentence that pulls you in, a nice dialog exchange and a surprise ending. What more could you ask out of 100 words? Two thumbs up!

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