Member-only story
Dog Days of Summer
(ed. Dec. 2020)
from “Short Story Dog Contest …the Official blog”
When I was about five years old, my mother took my brother and I back to my grandmother’s old house by the beach in San Felipe. At the time, San Felipe was a small port town. It lies on the beautiful Baja California peninsula, facing the Gulf of California, where the desert meets the sea. My mother’s plan was to stay for some time, do maintenance on the house that had long remained in a state of deterioration. In those days, my mother and father had been separated for over a year (at least unofficially), so to make a living, we sold beach products to the American tourists: colorful inner-tubes, flip-flops, plastic shovels and pails for their plump American children. My mother was a good saleswoman, on top of that, she was easy on the eyes, and having two adorable green-eyed boys to help her didn’t hurt her sales.
That was the summer my brother and I and dozens of other children brought out old plastic paint pails — the ones in which you could bathe a small child — and filled them with the little fish that come out to spawn in the surf on the only full moon in September. They would twirl around each other, form spirals in the sand, lay hundreds of little eggs in the circular craters they left behind. We were joined by a small group of pinnipeds, who kept a safe distance from us children and also…
