nicholas and the injured man

At first, Nicholas wasn't at all sure he liked the situation. When the man who calls him Dog came through the apartment door wearing the robot leg and with one arm in a sling, Nicholas didn't like that robot leg and barked at it. It was black and full of big hard plastic parts and straps and went all the way from the man's thigh to his ankle, and Nicholas suspected that this wasn't really the man at all but a cyborg lookalike.

"Hey, Dog!" the man said. "Stop that!"

Nicholas was mostly reassured.

The woman with the lap was running around the apartment grabbing weird things like frozen blue ice bags and rattling pill bottles. She put the man in the bed. The man used all the pillows in the house, which wasn't fair, because those pillows belonged to Nicholas.

No, this was not how it was supposed to be at all. The woman with the lap was supposed to be at work and the man who calls him Dog was supposed to be in the studio room, painting, or sitting at the computer and pretending to want to be painting, and Nicholas was supposed to be sleeping on those pillows.

Nicholas was polite and didn't say anything.

But then, there next to the man's ankle on the pile of pillows was a patch of sun. The man smiled a tired smile and patted the bed beside him, and Nicholas made one short, efficient jump up onto the pillows. Making sure to be careful, Nicholas curled up in the sun next to the man's foot and closed his eyes.

It was warm there and he was happy. Yes, he could get to like this injury thing. He could get to like this a lot.