Shale and The Pie

A short story by HrryNrmn

Shale is a copyrighted character of HrryNrmn and may not be used without his express written permission.  All Rights Reserved; 2007

Shale was walking along, looking as though he hadn’t a care in the world. The sun was shining in the sky; it was a bright day in late spring.  The air had the delicious aroma it sometimes gets on those perfect days: the smell of flowers, sunshine, and abundant growth.  It seemed as if the whole earth were glad to be free of winter.  Shale, for his part, was certainly glad to be free from winter; his short fur was no protection against howling winds and snows. His gate showed him to be the carefree individual that he was.  He had nowhere in particular to go and was in no hurry to get there.  As such, he was looking interestedly around him, noticing a bee buzzing near a flower, a yapping Pomeranian tied up in a yard which he paid little attention to, and the breeze gently caressing his fur. Presently, he stopped to sniff at a particularly interesting fence post.  Then he moved along.

            As he rounded the corner of the fence, he saw, across an open yard, a sight that made his day even better.  Sitting, unattended, was a pie. Granted, it wasn’t simply sitting on the lawn; that would be foolish.  It was sitting on a cooling rack in an open, first floor window. Now, Shale was nothing if not curious. He sniffed the air, seeing if he could determine exactly what type of pie it might be.  Being that he was a greyhound, his sense of smell wasn’t as talented as some, but he knew he ought to be able to tell a pie from less than 30 feet away.  “Hmm,” he thought to himself, “blueberries!”  Shale’s ears perked up at the thought of tasty blueberry pie.  His tale began to wag, slowly at first, but it picked up speed as the thought of flaky crust and gooey berries began to play upon his senses. Now, Shale was no thief, but he was hungry and he thought to himself that no harm could really come from simply tasting the pie.  The idea that the human inhabitants of the house may not have wanted a greyhound sampling their dessert never entered his head, or if it did, it was casually ignored.

            He crept ever so carefully across the neatly manicured lawn.  The dappled shade from a tree lent him what he thought of as extra camouflage.   His brindle coat nearly brushed the ground as he inched toward the window.  At last, he came up beneath the window, nearly standing in the flowers that were planted beneath.  The flowers kept him from getting as close to the house as he would have liked, however, he was big and by placing his front paws on the vinyl siding of the house, he was able to reach up into the window.  He grabbed the pie tin in his jaws, his top teeth sinking into the crust. It offered him a tantalizing taste of the pie within.  He began to drool slightly.  Then, disaster struck. 

His paws fell off the slippery surface of the siding, and he clipped himself under the chin on the windowsill.  The pie, for its part, pirouetted through the air, turning crust over tin. Shale looked up, just in time to see a tan colored blur strike him full in the face.  It was, of course, the pie.  Shale shook his head, startled, causing the remainder of the pie to fall into the flowers. Luckily, the pie had mostly cooled, or Shale would likely have been badly burned.  Blueberry juice ran down his chin, and several blueberries and pieces of crust stayed perched on his head and muzzle.  Shale tried to lick them off as best he could, although, naturally, he couldn’t reach the top of his own head with his tongue.  He quickly realized this, and happily fell to eating the pie out of the flowerbed.  It was somewhat dirty and his first mouthful included several flower petals and a leaf or two.  He was not picky however, and figured that flowery pie was far better than no pie at all.

He heard a shuffling noise above him and looked up to see a large female face, the hair on top of the head done up in curlers.  The face was scowling down at him.  Shale sharply sucked in his breath, and nearly choked on a berry he had in his mouth.  The face frowned even more deeply.  Shale, now thoroughly startled, backed up, his tale between his legs.  The face disappeared back into the house.  Shale slowly moved backwards across the lawn, eying the window suspiciously.  He was beginning to think that he’d imagined the face or that perhaps, if he were quick, he could get another bite of pie before it returned, when the door burst open with a crash.  A large and very ugly woman was striding toward him, with a kind of determined speed that only the very large are truly capable of.  Her flowered housedress billowed out behind her like the sail of some fantastic ship.  Her thick legs pumped with the effort of lumbering across the lawn.  She yelled out, sounding rather like a steam engine that had learned to talk.  She punctuated every few words with a gasp or a snort, so that it seemed as if the steam engine was laboring to make it up some steep incline.

“Hey….you!  Get away…..from…..my pie!”  Shale’s face was the picture of panic.  The woman raised the spatula she was carrying and threw it with a force and accuracy that belied her ungainly appearance.  The spatula jackknifed through the air, striking Shale hard on his side. He yelped, although he was unhurt, and turned tail to run.  He sprinted out of the yard and into the street.  At that moment, a moving van was lumbering up the street, looking not terribly unlike the woman in the yard.  The driver cried out and slammed both feet down on the brakes.  The van screeched to a halt and the driver leaned out his window.  Recovering his voice and salty language after his initial fright, he began bawling in the voice of a veteran workman.  He was yelling, in very descriptive terms, about unique and possibly illegal acts that Shale ought to perform upon himself.

Shale heard little or none of the curses directed at him.  He turned briefly once he reached the safety of the sidewalk across the street to see the large woman stooping heavily to pick up the spatula off the lawn.  He shook his head, ridding himself of the last of the crust stuck to his ear.  “Gosh,”he thought to himself.  “Pie is certainly not easy to get!”