The first story I ever wrote

I was ten or so when I wrote my first "book." It was written on that beige three lined paper meant to help me separate my upper case letters from my lower case. I tried to find it today. For reasons unknown, I've kept every paper I wrote when I was a Sociology major and an original copy of Madonna's Sex. But my first book has been lost to the ages. The last time I saw it, I was going through my dad's things after he died. My dad was sentimental and a bit of a hoarder. He kept everything, from his notebooks as an architecture student, to cancelled checks dating back to the Nixon administration.

But back to my book. The plot went something like this:

A young girl finds a stray dog in an abandoned car. Her parents, having no souls, won't let her keep the dog, so it stays in the junker. The evil parents discover she's been taking regular trips to the car to feed the dog and forbid her from doing it any more. In despair, the child runs away from home, sleeps in the car with the dog, and promptly drops over from pneumonia. There is some dramatic rescue where the dog finds the parents and bring them to the girl. She, of course, recovers, and the dog is allowed to live with them.

There are obvious plot holes (if the parents know what she's been up to, I suspect the car would have been their first stop). And the story bears a striking similarity to the plot of Dog! by Prudence Andrews.

My boyfriend at the time read the story and laughed. Then he said, "You know what would be great? If the dog was dead the whole time."

Freaking brilliant.