blue

"Your dog is cute," I said, noncomittally.

The dog looked up at me with a stupid expression. Its mouth was smeared with blue. Its left leg was also blue. Less than an hour ago, I had watched Giada de Laurentiis eagerly drip cobalt coloring into a batch of frosting. She was teaching viewers how to make blue cookies for a themed football party. I thought about all of these Southern California women and how they dressed their dogs in sweaters and dyed their fur to suit the occasion.

The girl (she was more of a girl than a woman) looked down and smiled. "He ate a pen."

"Huh?"

"He ate ink."

I looked more closely. The dog looked like a toddler who had been confined to a highchair for dinner and had been released with most of its meal on its face. For lack of better words, it was a very adorable sight. I wanted to hug the dog without touching it and move all of my pens into storage and feed it blue cookies. I almost wanted to kick myself for thinking so.