Bedtime Tales by Jackie Parrish

Kids heres a little tale about a grizzled pug who won't eat a tempura sweet potato. And it goes something like this:

One humid night right before bed a tired mom was clearing dinner plates hours after they should have been cleared. When out of the quiet hum of the dishwasher she hears the wuffle of a strange animal. Is it a wolverine, a wildebeast, a snuffleumagus? No, it was a pug just trying to breathe. He came in with those sad pug eyes and seemed to say " are you really going to just chuck all that good food in the trash?" Oh, alright first born child of mine that I never gave birth to, you can have a tempura sweet potato. This is where the story gets good kids, gather round, the pug took the sweet potato in his little varmit teeth and ran out of the room quick as a fat lady in a movie theatre with a giant tub of popcorn. That makes no sense, but he ran away fast. That pug carried that sweet potato for the better part of 10 minutes and could never quite figure out where to take it to eat it. He has been guarding the sweet potato in our dining room now for the entire time it's taken me to tell my tale and has lunged at Gatsby twice for coming too close to his prize. He always has had a bit of a Napoleon complex. Now this ends my story, but to this day I hear on foggy nights when the crickets are quiet you can hear that pug and his labored breathing still carrying that sweet potato.