Prompt: joint (articulation)
Her hands were sore again. The joints of her hands were always sore. She wondered if it had anything to do with her current stress levels. They were sky rocketing, especially since she learned that her dog, Snow, went missing. She left her out in the yard one freezing evening to pee, because the stubborn beast just wanted to play instead of doing her business. Of course Rachel went back out not even ten minutes after she went inside, to find a pile of poo in her backyard but no German Shepard. She rushed back inside to put on her boots and her hat, grabbed a flashlight and her keys and started looking for her. To no avail: Snow was gone to God knows where. She probably found some way through the bushes and the fence…
Rachel knew that she should’ve fixed the fence properly instead of just temporarily. The guilt kept her awake that night but she promised herself to resume the search in the morning.
The next day, after a quick coffee and toast, she began her search in the neighbourhood, following the path that they took on their daily walks. Again, to no avail: Rachel would have to expand the perimeter of her search. Sad, she went back home to get her truck. The pick up truck had seen better days, more specifically better decades, as it was a 1986 model. She was climbing inside the cab when it hit her: Snow had a chip implanted under her skin! The poor thing was probably just hiding from the cold somewhere, after realizing that being free wasn’t that much fun after all. Rachel cursed herself for being so slow on the uptake and hoped that Snow’s fur was thick enough to withstand the freezing cold, because it was well below -15 degrees Celsius this morning.
She grabbed her cellphone from her jacket’s pocket and, finding the PetLocator™ app on it, turned it on. It took well over a minute for it to display the red dot signalling’s Snow’s presence on the GPS. Rachel furrowed her brows; she did not understand why it showed the dog being just a few blocks from her house. She was apparently in the backyard of one of her neighbours.
“Puppy, what are you doing all the way over there?”
More stress made her joints sorer; and her stomach tightened with anxiety. She feared that something had happened to Snow. It was her nightmare. The dog was already a year and a half old but Rachel still considered her her baby. It was the dog that she and her wife saved from the shelter a bit more than a year ago. Unfortunately, it was all a story of the past and it was just Rachel and Snow now.
Shaking her head to make the bad thoughts go away, Rachel got out of her truck and walked toward her neighbour’s home to get her Snow back.