Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito

the charge was reckless driving and verbal assault on a police officer. She instructed me to “take your wiseass friend’s car the hell off my road before I have it impounded.” I obeyed smirkingly, and after parking his car back in the campus lot (not under the sycamore) and cleaning the droppings off his hood, I finally arrived home as dusk was just beginning to stretch its shadows before fading off to sleep. I poked around my kitchen for a while, postponing the inevitable call to Sophia. It wasn’t long, however, before she rang me.
    She was scared and angry, wistful and distraught. She cried on the other end of the line, and the most I could do to comfort her was swing the phone cord from side to side and echo Blip’s words, “Everything will turn out all right.” I told her that he had mentioned something about “the hounds of hell,” and that elicited a chuckle. She must have sensed my curiosity, and she related the story behind it. I was grateful. It gave me goose bumps.
    On the first anniversary of the day they met, Blip surprised Sophia by taking her to a luxury cabin for the weekend. On the
way there, they picked up a hitchhiker who, after learning that it was their anniversary, presented them with a bag of magic mushrooms as they dropped him off. Thrilled, they thanked him and went to explore a nearby gorge, where they consumed their gift. They decided to leave, however, when they saw a father smack his son for jumping into the creek with his shoes on.
    By the time they returned to their car, the effects of the mushrooms were beginning to manifest, and they thought they’d better hurry to their cabin while they could still drive. Along the way, however, the two of them were so awestruck by a grassy hillside that they pulled over and decided to run to the top of it.
    As it happened, a nearby resident was in the habit of leaving his Doberman unleashed. When they were a good distance away from their car, barefoot and defenseless, the dog came trotting along beside them. It did nothing as long as they kept moving away from his territory, and their car, but as soon as they would stop or try to make their way back, it would bare its teeth and growl. Tripping madly by this time, they wound up having to go to a stranger’s house and ask with trembling voices if the alcoholic woman who answered the door could please call her neighbor and have him bring his guard dog in. After this ordeal of the surreal, Blip and Sophia made straight for their luxury cabin to try and salvage what was left of their trip, their anniversary, and their sanity. Blip kept repeating, “Fucking Dobermans and ’shrooms do
not
mix, fucking Dobermans and ’shrooms do
not
mix,” until they got to their country cabin, where the couch pillows were embroidered with a picture of a big black dog on a grassy hillside.
    After turning over all the pillows and leaving speculation about such a formidable coincidence until later, they discovered
that they had their own grassy hillside. It was even better than the one they had seen earlier, there was no Doberman guarding it, and they’d paid for their right to be there undisturbed. So that’s where they stayed all day, running around the gentle slope, marveling at the dandelions that had been flung about the entire hill, finding cherubic shapes in the clouds, and making love under the dome of the sky. Toward evening they watched the sun set and the stars come on from their hilltop perch, then retreated back to the cabin with its full kitchen and a hot tub on the porch. Sophia described it as the best day of their lives, when no matter what tumultuous events were going on in the world or just down the road, they were alive and at peace. They decided that day that if they ever had a little girl, they would name her Dandelion.
    â€œAnd do you know what he said to me just before I went to sleep that night?” Sophia said, her voice filled with