“What is it with you and dogs?” my friend asked as we sat in the glistering sun, drinking iced-coffee and looking over the square.
“What do you mean?” I snapped back as the question had hit me off-guard and I had no clue where he was going with this.
“Did a dog bite you as a child?”
“No,” not that I could remember.
“Did you own a dearly loved dog that met its fate in a tragic accident?”
“No,” I would have remembered if that had been the case.
“Did you always want a dog but were never allowed to?”
“No,” but I did at some point long for a hamster.
“Then why do dogs always appear in such a negative light in your stories?”
“What? They do?”
In my mind I ran through the collection of short stories I had published a few weeks earlier. Dogs did indeed make an appearance in a few of the stories, but I could not see that they did so in a negative way.
“It’s like there’s a dog in your soul,” my friend declared after a short pause.
That was the weirdest psychoanalysis I had ever heard.
“I must say that I neither believe in a dog in a soul nor a soul in a dog.”
“Look! You did it again!”
“What?”
“Oh, never mind,” my friend sighed. “I would, however, if I were you, have this issue looked at by a specialist one day.”