Read this short story in your best Rod Serling voice:
Imagine if you will, a ten degree morning on an ice covered farm. The sun is brilliant, bouncing wide, metallic sheets of light off of every surface. The wind is mercifully nonexistent.
Everywhere you look is a snow dusted pine tree or a pile of oak leaves, crunchy and frosted and as still as a sculpture. Chickens are clucking, a goose is skronking, and horses are whinnying their demands for breakfast.
Now you see a happy and energetic Puppy following his giant best friend German Shepherd during morning chores. They are flipping like fish and bounding across the weather stiffened tundra. Their claws mostly grip the ice, but not always. Still, they run and chase and beg the Lady to play fetch and keepaway with a frozen softball. When the Lady throws it, the puppy runs with absolute abandon, no thought given to its trajectory or obstacles or ice or anything.
The Lady is not great at throwing. The Puppy has not learned this yet.
The softball lands on this side of a wire fence, in the vicinity of a young steer, his face buried in a pile of soft hay. The puppy is exactly one second behind the ball. He hits his brakes. His claws fail. He skids on his bottom, pliable young puppy legs splayed, toward the ice dusted Thing With Horns. Thankfully, the fence is between them, but still they bump, giant face to small body, and the Thing With Horns emits the deepest, most baritone objection the puppy has ever heard. A rare sound, it startles the Lady too.
The Puppy regroups, retreats to the Lady without the prize, and checks over his shoulder to see that the fence is still in place. Fetch and Keepaway continue but not without some anxiety.
The End.
