Neon in Daylight by Hermione Hoby

Author:Hermione Hoby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

15

Dennis never failed him. Always got to his feet with difficulty as he heard Bill enter the apartment, and ambled over, head slung low, body stiff, tail wagging faintly to greet his owner’s return. Always doggily, indomitably himself. He pushed his muzzle into Bill’s hand and gratefully licked the sweat.

“Hey, man,” Bill said, closing the door behind him, slinging his keys. “Hot, right?”

Dennis twitched his ears and rearranged his chops in a way that seemed to Bill to be affirmative, and then resumed panting with soulful eyes. Bill swore, sometimes, that this look expressed regret at not being able to parse human words.

The AC units whirred.

It always struck him as a great gender unfairness that women, in temperatures like this, could wear next to nothing and look desirable, but that men in shorts were, unfailingly, considered buffoons. Even a man in a T-shirt was halfway to being a buffoon. Or at least, a man of his age was. With a semifrozen beer in hand and a cold, soaked dishcloth over his head, Bill yielded to the sofa and allowed it—the day, the heat, everything—to vanquish him.

When he parked the beer and pulled off his damp shirt, balling it beside him, Dennis followed the object with intent, his nose twitching.

“No, dude, you don’t want to smell that.”

Dennis, chastened, dipped his head, doleful-eyed.

Bill switched on his default hate-watch of a news channel. A blond-helmeted Stepfordian in a pink suit was addressing him from behind a desk, manicured hands clasped firmly.

“Record temperatures,” she was saying. And now the man beside her—because she was just a woman, wasn’t she, and these TV people must think viewers needed “masculine authority”—confirmed it: “One of the hottest summers on record.”

Dennis sat at his feet, alive and attentive, his sides heaving. They stared at each other with mutual regard, an old benevolence.

“And now,” the female voice was saying, “is this little boy corrupting your children?”

The screen split into two: on the left, her face, immobile save for the infinitesimally raised eyebrows, indicating that this, fellow Americans, was not your average story; on the right, a freeze-frame from a video.

“A boy from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has become a YouTube supercelebrity.”

As she spoke, the footage of a hyperanimated tween began. He was wearing saucy little pink shorts and a tie-dyed crop top, mugging for the camera in his bedroom, rolling his eyes with draggy glamour, pouting, and then pushing his butt inches away from the camera and oscillating that butt with remarkable speed, all while casting a look of precocious sexual intent over his left shoulder. Bill turned to his dog.

“Is this child corrupting you, Dennis?”

Dennis’s tail drifted back and forth with uncertainty.

“Going by the YouTube name of Tiniest B,” the anchor said, stressing it in a way that made clear she was as leery of this vulgarity and foolishness as you were, “the boy has attracted more than seventy million views online for videos that contain sexually inappropriate language and dances.”

Bill smiled at the screen. “Sexually inappropriate dances, bud. Watch out for them.

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