Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,71

before my birthday. I talked my lady into looking at a dog, with no pressure to bring one home, unless I saw one that I fell in love with and couldn’t live without. I’d gotten myself worked up in the weeks before, scrolling through dogs on Petfinder, fantasizing about little dogs I could dress up in teenie-weenie jackets and train to be mean to everyone but me. I even went so far as to e-mail the foster parent of a fat gray-haired Chihuahua mix named Coraline who was a million years old and had cancerous mammary tumors that needed to be removed and who was so stumpy and cute that I almost cried while reading her bio. I was so smitten, I considered letting a dog interview me for the opportunity to destroy my furniture and checkbook!! But she got adopted (are there other completely naive and irrational people in this town?) before I could put on my best suit and tie to go to whatever meth lab she was staying in to see if they’d consider letting me pay two hundred dollars to take her to my house.

That’s really how we ended up at the shelter, because I had been rejected by a dog who couldn’t read the love letter I’d tapped out on my cracked phone screen to win her over. As Lois at the front desk led us to the kennel, I felt my heart clench. I was powerless against the slobbery little beards and juicy sad eyes of the whimpering dogs. As we walked in, some kind of giant ridgeback mix launched himself at the cage door, gnashing his teeth and barking, up on his hind legs. “Not him!” Kirsten squeaked, hopping away from the spittle flying out of his cage. We walked by bored bulldogs and hyperactive hounds until finally we reached a heartbreakingly adorable cattle dog mix who had, judging by the size of her swollen nipples, definitely given birth in the recent past. She had some country-ass name, Backhoe or Wheelbarrow or some other farm shit, and I wanted her desperately. She looked at me like I was made out of sausage. I signaled to Lois that we wanted to take her to one of the soundproof SVU interview rooms, where I assumed she’d grill me on my whereabouts before slamming my head into a table and offering me a Styrofoam cup of coffee from which her partner would later extract my DNA to use in court to convict me of a crime they framed me for.

I watched the dog trot shyly down the hallway as I imagined her scampering through our sun-dappled house with the Sunday paper in her teeth. The three of us were left alone while Lois went to locate her history and vet records for a little background. I sat in one corner with a bag of treats and held them lovingly toward her. Kirsten sat in another corner with a different type of treat, shaking the bag gently in her direction. Tractor looked from one of us to the other, then back again, and did nothing. I scooted closer from my corner, Kirsten scooted closer from her corner, and ol’ Hog Oiler retreated farther into her corner.

“If I wanted to be rejected, I would just get another evil cat,” I said, and pouted.

We sat there for what felt like ages, cooing and singing and trying to coax Pitchfork out of her shell. Kirsten rewrote her thesis while I did the last four years of my taxes, and still…nada. Lois eased the door open and slid through a crack so the dog couldn’t take off running. Why she was concerned about an animal that had basically wallpapered herself to the farthest wall making a mad dash toward the exit was beyond me, but I guess you can never be too careful. Lil’ Wheat Chaff had come from dubious origins, and no one was quite sure of her age or how many babies she’d had or whether or not she liked jazz. The one thing they did know was that she “doesn’t really warm up to people and has noise sensitivity.”

“Aw, shit,” I grumbled, packing up the copy of The Iliad I had read in its entirety while we were trapped in the padded dog room. “They should’ve told us that from the jump. No thanks, Corn