Short story: A joke that backfired

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John's wife pulled a trick on John, who was always a bit innocently naive, and overly trusting. One day, she came home from work, with a dog in her car, telling John that someone from her work, was moving overseas, and didn't want their dog anymore, so she took it. The problem for John was though, that he would be the one to look after it. John was retired, but his wife was still working. John had joined a few groups, which he enjoyed attending, especially the book writing classes, called "Scribe for Life", which he attended, once a week. With the dog, now, John thought that he could not go out to attend this meeting, nor any others, too. This dog turned out to be very maladjusted, and clingy. If John left it in the backyard, it would bark, and howl, all day. If he opened the front door, without thinking about it, the dog, when inside, would rush so quickly out of the door, that John then had to round it up, somehow too. This only happened once, as John soon became more careful, when he opened the door, making sure the dog's leash was on, and he was holding it tightly. It was finicky in what it ate, and indiscriminate about where it peeed, not being trained, apparently. Life became very quickly a living nightmare for poor John. Whenever John tried to do anything inside, the dog would follow him closely around the house, clinging to his legs, at times. And as John was not young anymore, a couple of times, he fell over the dog, onto the floor of his house. If John shut the dog up in the laundry, with the door closed, the dog would howl, and claw, at the back of the laundry door, until let free. Slowly, John's life was destroyed. He started to go a little mad, so frustrated was he at this new impost on his life. And then, after two weeks of this, and when John was now at his wit's end, not knowing how to handle this pesky dog, his wife told him, we will take the dog back to its owner today. Apparently, the truth was that, she had only offered to mind it for two weeks, while the workmates were on holiday, in the next state to them. John breathed more than one sigh of relief, but the damage had been done, and he had been so rattled by this experience, that he had a major mental breakdown, and he spent the next month in the mental health ward, of their local hospital. Let's hope John's wife thinks twice next time before she pulls such a stunt on her husband John, like that, again. Life, and married life, is about connecting through love, not about playing cheap tricks on someone else, at their expense. Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com The dog dogged John's life, doggedly. The dog had made a dog's life out of John's life for him too.