Canis Major

by Jay Nichols

  * * *

  Price barreled past his dumbstruck wife, skidding on the dry flap of skin before throwing open the front door. In the back of her mind, Valerie recalled the slogan from Caldwell’s first campaign poster: Price Won’t Leave You Hangin’! Below that had been a picture of her husband running through an open office door. At the time, she’d assumed people would dismiss the poster as a gimmick, an empty promise for political expediency. But little did they know that, in real life, Caldwell Price was that running man. He always had to get involved—too involved—and stick his nose in where it didn’t belong.

  "Wait. Come back!" she cried out to the man disappearing into the night, on his way to making the biggest (well, the second biggest) mistake of his professional life. If he went after the person—Hector—any chance he had of being reinstated would be gone. He’d hurt him—that much she knew. But would he kill him? Valerie thought that he just might. Then again, it was just as likely he was heading off to the explosion to try for some of the old, macho glory that he craved so much. The problem was that both paths were career suicides.

  Valerie swore it was the things that dangled between men’s legs that caused all of their trouble and misery. How else could she explain it? It had to be their peckers that drove them to behave like idiots so much of the time. It just had to be. Because, in the end, all of their endless head butting and pissing contests never produced anything substantive—only bruised noggins and wet trees. Their competitions never begot any real victors, only men—boys—who, having played the game and "won," now bore the onus of having to look over their shoulders for the rest of their lives. Because the threat of someone bigger and badder showing up and knocking them from their exalted positions would always be there. In Valerie’s opinion, the men who chose to play those trivial and pointless shell games deserved all the misery and trouble that came their way. That included her husband, who—all good traits aside—bought into that chest-beating load of bullshit hook, line and sinker.

  "It never ends," she stated, watching the oversized pickup speed down the driveway and dissolve into the ink. "It just keeps going on and on like this forever."