Tuesday, January 28, 2025,  

Jones and the Dogs of Doom! 

 It all started on a warm summer morning when Jones, a 12-year-old boy**, was heading to his grandpa’s house, as he does every day, when he saw his grandpa running out of the house carrying tons of heavy-looking baggage and calling out Jones’s name. When he finally got to Jones, grandpa started speaking so fast that it almost sounded like gibberish “Hey, I need you to take care of my dogs while I am in Germany*. Plane leaves in 60 minutes, Bye!” As he jumped into the taxi whose driver had the old-fashioned “Where to, Mac?” attitude, Jones noticed his 86-year-old grandpa waving rapidly from the car window. After the taxi left his sight, he walked towards the house thinking ‘How hard can taking care of a bunch of dogs be? I trained in my pet sitting company for 2 years and never let down a single customer.’ 

Jones was immensely proud of his pet sitting company. He had taken care of little dogs like Snowball who was very gentle and never pulled on his leash or furitto the Weiner dog that looked like a furry burrito. He would walk dogs after school still wearing his nice school clothes and enjoys a nice walk before doing his homework.  

As soon as he entered the house that seemed like a palace, because it was finely made with marble and polished wood and smelled like lavender, how grandpa gathered the money to buy it is a secret that is to be told to Jones when he is older. He heard barking and somehow the dogs snuck up behind him and pounced on his back crushing him with the heavy weight of 8 massive hounds. He then crawled out of the doggy pile wondering why these dogs were acting so aggressively. ‘The dogs were always peaceful when grandpa was around,’ he thought. Then, he called out all the dogs’ names for lunch in this order: “Muncher, Chester, Dane, General, Arlo, Rover, Spot, and Rex come here!” And the dogs came, oh boy did they come. They came so fast that they were running over each other just to get to that delicious Farmers Dog™ Beef. Then they jumped onto Jones and gobbled up the food dropping dozens of crumbs on poor Jone’s brand-new shirt (some of it fell into Jone’s mouth and he tasted a mix of beef, veggies, and chicken)! That is when he decided to take them out for a walk to get them to shake off that extra energy and forget about their owner being absent.  

Jones only managed to get the dogs leashes on by holding a pack of Farmers Dog™ over an open fire that grandpa had left in the fireplace as a threat to get them to sit so he could put the leashes on. Then, as soon as he took a step out of the house the dogs started barking like they were rabid, and they started running so fast with so much force that Jones went flying holding onto the leash while he was screaming “HEEEELP!” He went flying through Old Man Jeffery’s lawn, the maze of tables in front of Papa’s Pizzeria, his home’s backyard, and over the mayor’s brick wall which had the mayor’s private pool on the other side. Then, he was plunged headfirst into the surprisingly clean water by a bunch of playful dogs. Jones would have drowned if it were not for the mayor’s personal guard grabbing him and the dogs out of the drink and escorting them out the door. 

A day after that incident in the pool, on a smoking, scorching summer day, Jones decided to go to the Kwik-E-Mart to fetch more Farmer’s Dog™ after the dogs acted like Pac-Man© over the Farmer’s Dog™ packets and their contents. Then the dogs assaulted the security guard who was standing in front of the store and one of their paws turned the knob on the Guard’s Taser to MAXIMUM POWER and when it activated in the guards pouch it touched his side, and the entire crowd of dogs and humans almost flew in all directions. Do you remember the ‘flop like a fish’ part in the SpongeBob™ theme song? Good, because that is what that poor guard and Jones did (not the dogs somehow). Apu, the guy who was on the shift in the store, freaked out and called the hospital muttering things about dog demons as he waited for someone to answer. When the paramedics arrived, they said that the dogs could not go into the hospital due to the chance of them carrying bacteria. The dogs did not take no for an answer and threatened the paramedics and half of the hospital staff into letting them stay in Jones’s room. In the hospital, Jones remained with the dogs with them whining about not getting their Farmer’s Dog™ for two of the remaining five days before grandpa returned.  

After a few days of getting ambushed by the dogs and praying for grandpa to return early grandpa finally returned right before the dogs were about to give Jones a bite so big he would have died from blood infection thanks to the dogs’ dirty mouths. Right when grandpa opened the door the dog's eyes widened, and they ran towards him in a mix of barks and whines to give him a big dog hug.  

Then he looked up from his dogs and said to Jones “The dogs are incredibly happy; it was as easy as pie for you! Eh?” “Yeah, easy as pie” Jones replied sarcastically.  

        NOTES 

*Jones later finds out that his grandfather went to Germany because his grandfather left his pet hamster in his aunt’s house after visiting last year. 

** Jones also is a brown-haired boy of German and Irish descent, and he loves taking care of pets so much that in his spare time he runs a pet sitting and walking service.