A man was taking the dog on his morning walk; the dog, for his part, was snarfing down blades of spring sedge freshly sprouted along the side of the road, immediately expelling them with a raucous hack, and then repeating the procedure, seemingly ad infinitum.

“You know,” remarked the man, “they say that the true definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

“That might be what they say,” replied the dog, “but I say it’s talking to your dog as if you were expecting him to answer.”

“And I say it’s thinking that he just did,” chimed in a nearby bush.

Eli S. Evans

has work published in several now or possibly soon-to-be defunct literary magazines, as well as some with a more promising future. His small book of small stories, Obscure & Irregular, was published in 2021 by Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera, which recently released his larger book of mostly even smaller stories, Various Stories About Specific Individuals in Particular Situations (August 2023).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Man on an Airplane, microfiction in Maudlin House (6 September 2023)

⚡ Two Friends, prose poem in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 13, May 2022)

⚡ The Accidental Generalissimo, microfiction in Maudlin House (2 February 2022)