juliet wrote this story:
doozy
jane’s parents gave her a little dog for her eighth birthday.
jane wanted to name the dog daisy, but jane’s father took his pipe out of his mouth and said,
that is the most common name for a female dog. surely, jane, you want to name her something a bit more original.
so jane named the little dog doozy.
two years later, jane’s mother divorced jane’s father. jane’s father did not contest jane’s mother’s custody of jane.
jane and her mother now lived in a smaller house on a narrower, busier street. doozy no longer had a
big yard to run around in. there was a small yard behind the small house but doozy could sometimes jump or climb over its low fence and run and play with other dogs on the sidewalk in front of the house.
one day when jane was in school, doozy was run over and killed by a speeding ambulance, which was rushing to attend to a woman who had had a heart attack, the result of eating too many cheeseburgers and too many hot dogs with spicy mustard.
jane cried when she came home from school and heard the news.
jane’s mother tried to console her. doozy is in dog heaven now, she told jane.
jane dried her eyes. no, mother, she said, doozy is not in dog heaven or any other kind of heaven, any more than you or i are. but i swear to you that from this day forward i will dedicate myself to creating a better world in which dogs and cats and women and children are no longer treated as second class creatures, and in which giant corporations can no longer exploit people by foisting unhealthy eating habits on them.
jane was true to her word. when she left school she took a job at a non-profit organization that worked to improve the lives of both domestic and wild animals worldwide. she never married or had children and worked for the organization for forty years, in offices all over the world.
when jane retired, some of her colleagues gave her a nice lunch, and gave her a little brass statuette of doozy, whose fate jane had on occasion mentioned to them.
the statue did not look at all like doozy, but jane did not point that out.
the end
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