Chapter 14

You walk Doc. Jeffy doesn't come because she wasn't ready, and still isn't, but she's getting there. She's looking for her keys right now.
Doc was ready to walk, and still is, but he isn't ready to poop. It hasn't been that long since he ate, and he's a dog, but he's also a snake. And imagination.
You walk and walk and walk Doc and it is dark but you see many things: kids, buildings, gum, marquises, the projected image of a horse, the projected image of a waffle. You used to feel playful. You now feel weird, like a waffle: noncommittal. You turn around.
"No!" Doc says.
"Wow! Really?" you say and turn back around and walk Doc, but obediently this time. It takes a long time for Doc to answer your question: forever, and some time later you will question whether or not anyone else would have heard Doc say "No!" had anyone else been there. You almost question it right
now! but you forget to when Doc slips his collar and looks both ways and races across the street and broadsides a car, because the car came out of nowhere, or, if you like, the car came from above. It alighted neatly about a moment, give or take, before Doc made a mess of it. Now it is bent and now it is folded, and an image of the accordion-necked woman is projected inside your head. Doc is not bent or folded, but dazed or remorseful. He sits quietly staring past the wrinkled car, probably with some sort of emotion, while you refasten and tighten his collar.
Expecting to find the most coincidental personage inside the car, you peer into the tinted window next to the driver's seat only to find the most coincidental personage inside the car. The woman with the accordion neck. You pull on the handle of the door, which is stuck like car doors on wrecked cars always are, and it's late, and you're tired, so you quit, and you shrug, and you feel pretty good about the way things turned out because that woman is scary.
That woman unlocks her door and sidles out and signs, "Thanks, sugar," instead of saying, "Thanks, sugar" in chorus. She doesn't mean it.
"I'm sorry," you sign. "I thought the door was stuck." You pause to examine her neck for any potential accordion properties and find something even more interesting: a hole, from smoking, like in the posters. You breathe a sigh of relief and "I thought you were someone else," you sign.
"Fuck you," she signs and stalks off to the other side of the street where Doc was staring, which reminds you about Doc and how you aren't holding the leash attached to the collar on his neck. "Doc?" you say and you look around and you don't see him. "Doc?" you say and you look across the street where he was staring and you don't see him and you don't see the woman from the poster anymore, and where was she going? and what about her car? Can you have it? You'll come back for it, after you find Doc. "Doc?" you say and you whistle.