Philobarbarism: Fifi and the Wild Boys

I was walking one night down a street in a ruined city in one of those small Third World countries I so often find myself in-- for me a way of life and an employment opportunity but for others only destruction, despair, and death. The moon was up and full, back-lighting the sour smoke in the evening air, dragging a cosmetic haze across the city-scape. It is pretty, this pastel coloring of war cast limply over a city. I looked across to my right, to a bomb crater filled with smouldering garbage and damp, fetid rubble: there a pack of dogs rooted for food, red-eyed dogs bony, flea-bitten and mangy. They were a pack, those hungry beasts, a dangerous thing when one is alone in the night. Something caught their attention, and happily, it wasn't me. The dog-pack dashed as one across the trash and up the crater slope. I laughed!

Trotting behind the pack was a sparkling white poodle in a rhinestone collar. Fifi, determined, she was having some real trouble keeping up with her new-found friends, though she was trying very, very hard. Ooh la la: Fifi runs with the wild boys now. The pack, alert and hungry, they probably found something for dinner. I think.

Oh, Fifi. But still, I had to laugh.