Say Ibsen were famous and some dog were cast as him. And he certainly wasn’t a dog who lives for chasing, or any purposeless expenditure. He wasn’t one of those dogs who spends his waking hours scratching his ears and falling over backwards after trying to bite the root of his tail, or whining to be noticed, or acting like a butler who never mentions the stench of slippers. And by that, we don’t mistake busyness for work. Ibsen didn’t feel the loss, and not because he was blissfully ignorant. The town’s Players didn’t tolerate children at performances and eschewed Little Orphan Annie because of Merrilee Fairweather’s purported allergy. He could have been a cert in the movies, but if he’d ever wanted to sit at the drugstore counter to be discovered, he’d never have been allowed to, in that town–and besides, he probably would have preferred to work on the stage, though that is a speculation. Being a virile male of middle years whose chin badly needed a shave, one could easily have said he had a morbid cast but one would be wrong. Now this dog–and since we didn’t catch his name, we’ll just call him Ibsen–was a rough-haired, right-flop-eared bitser of no particular color except for the black patch around his left eye. Lovecraft, though this dog enjoyed his Will Cuppy, always licking his chops over the line, “The nuthatch cannot sing and does not try.”

THERE WAS A MAN who had a dog who had–for the good part of every day–never heard of H. The Dog Who Wished He’d Never Heard of Lovecraft – illustration by Galen Dara – click to image enlarge

Crandolin by Anna Tambour