My name is Sophie Bromley and I’m a havanese puppy living in the Bromley household with my mom Lori, my dad Harry, and my sister Julia. My mom is like the sanctity one in the family, while my dad just walks around with knickers on and these obnoxious looking clodhoppers. My sister, though, acts completely inane. Her only job is sinecure, as it is only to walk me out every now and then. And when she tries to hold me to make me look “cute” and acts ludicrous, she jounces me around and makes me all nauseous. Even though they all (besides my mother) have their flaws, I am surrounded with love and happiness and I couldn’t be more thankful to have them as my family. Although, sometimes I don’t know if they feel the same about me. This house is anything but anarchy, and I feel completely tacit in the family. I have no voice in any of the family decisions; like when they go on vacation for example. My goodness, when they go on vacation I feel so irate, and my barking turns to more of a resonant sound. I have very bad anxiety, and when they leave me home alone I get scared- like there’s some insidious creature in the house that could bane me. They usually just walk around me and act conniver as I bark, but I try my best to get their attention and make them not leave me. When they don’t notice me though, I feel abashed because its like I’m barking to myself. I just want to scream out and say, “Hello?! Do you not hear the loud barking dog trying to make you stay home?!” When I act very badly though and make cacophonic sounds, they lock me in the cage to teach me a lesson. When they do that, I try to look into my mom’s eyes with treachery so that she’ll know how upset I am. I start to insinuate just how much they love me. Once they vindicated me from that terrible place, I can’t impinge the cage for weeks just because it brings back such sad memories. But to make sure I don’t end up in that place again, I have to keep reminding myself that we have a Decalogue structure in this house, and since I am very vulnerable, I have to stop myself from doing anything that could make my family upset. Anyway, my family recently went on vacation (like I talked about before) and I learned to accept the fact that I was going to be alone for a couple of days. So I crawled on to the top part of the couch and sat there for a bit, thinking of how I will entertain myself during the time they’ll be gone. Deep into my thoughts, I started to hear my family having a very fey conversation. My sister and my mom were fighting, and I ran in to hear all the gossip and why they were making so much noise. It seemed like my sister was begging for something, but my mom was refuting every little thing she was saying. Julia started to get very annoyed, and then all of a sudden went up to me and patted my head saying how sorry she was. Whatever that meant, I didn’t really care. Julia always acts emotional for no reason, so I didn’t think anything of it. The next day they were off to East Hampton and left me behind. Every now and then the neighbor would come over and make sure I had enough food and water, and to take me out. She came
