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Carl arrived home just after 6:00 pm as usual, on a Friday ending another long week. He set his briefcase down by the front door of their ground-floor condo and walked over to the china cabinet in the dining room to see if he'd been put in the doghouse. He had. And so he cracked a beer from the fridge and grabbed a microwavable chicken potpie out of the freezer. His wife Linda would be in their bedroom all night with a migraine. And he would settle in on the couch again.
It was his own fault she used the ceramic dog and doghouse to let him know whether or not he could come into his own bedroom. He'd had the idea on one of her bad migraine days. She'd called him at his office to let him know she'd be leaving her own office early, another killer migraine. She just wanted to crawl in bed and block out the world. Knowing he was part of the world, he'd said to her, "Hey, why don't you put that little ceramic dog, the one in the china cabinet, in its little doghouse if you don't want me to bother you when I come home. If the dog's in the doghouse I'll know you want the bedroom to yourself and I'll watch TV quietly, then sleep on the couch." They'd both thought it was kind of a funny idea, and it was kind of cute in the beginning, Carl coming home just after his wife to see if the glossy white and black Dalmatian had been put in its little red doghouse, but Carl was over it now. Carl didn't like feeling like hed done something wrong when he hadn't. He'd started to resent the dog and the doghouse and he swore that one of these nights he was going to smash the damn things.
These days his wife put the dog in the doghouse about three times a week. Usually on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Linda's migraines had apparently developed a pattern. Carl knew that her migraines were real. The poor thing had been suffering with them for decades, practically her whole adult life, but Carl was starting to suspect that on some of these Mondays,...