after the election
by Randall Perry
That feeling when you step in a piece of dog shit on your way to work & you move off the sidewalk to the grass to wipe it off but it’s gotten into the treads on the bottom of your shoe & you know you’re going to have to scrape it out with a stick & the thought of it makes you gag but you do it anyway & you think you’ve gotten all of it but some invisible dog shit is still there & you know you’ll never get it all & it stinks up the bus & it stinks up your desk & it stinks up the meeting room & everybody’s nose screws up but nobody says anything about it but oh the side-eye from some of them & you know they know exactly what’s going on & you know you’ll have to throw both the shoes out (& goddammit they were your best pair) & you’ll have to pay more attention to the sidewalk going forward but your eyes can’t be everywhere at once because yes there are millions of responsible dog owners in the world but just as many entitled people (& so arrogant & so confrontational these people) who leave the dog shit behind instead of picking it up & sure they goddamn well know better but you can’t do anything about it & you just set your teeth to carry on but resolve to tell people whose dogs are shitting on the sidewalk to clean the mess because good shoes are expensive but you think no you’d better not because you know how people can be & they might get in your face pontificating go fuck yourself asshole they say all puffed up & spit flying we pay too much taxes & we voted for a gover-mint to lower our taxes & fire all the CEOs & get rid of sex-ed for fuck sake look what they’re teaching the kids in school now all them ay-thee-ists saying there’s no God & they tell boys they can cut off their willy if they don’t want it & they tell girls take down your pants & dance around the desks in front of everyone in class & they let kids play switcheroo at the doctor’s now & we can’t call them he or she anymore so you can kiss my ass that’s what we voted for & if you don’t like it that’s just too goddamn bad you know the old days were better days & we didn’t have all this woke bullshit back then so you better get used to it & this is the way things are now THE PEOPLE are in charge & we’re going back to the old ways the better ways & you realize there are more of those dog owners in the neighbourhood the ones who let their dogs bark all night in the back yard & they piss in your flowerbed & they shit on the lawn & it’s left to bake in the hot sun & you know some people are just pinched off from the same turd so look now there’s your foot track in it & you thought everything was fine you weren’t watching the news & not listening to the radio & not watching where you were going & you know not to buy good clothes for the next while in case the shit starts to fly in other ways.
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BIO: Randall Perry is an editor and writer living in Toronto, Ontario. He is currently consulting editor at Sudbury’s Latitude 46 Publishing. His fiction has appeared in Islandside and On the Run, as well as in the anthologies Fear from a Small Place and Storgy 2019. His non-fiction essays, columns, and reviews have appeared in Wayves, The ARC Quarterly, Outlooks, and fab.
He is @randall_perry on Instagram and @randallperry.bsky.social on BlueSky.