When You Don’t Listen, You Don’t Know…

Our crazy adventures didn’t stop even during the Christmas prep chaos or the madness surrounding my book launch, so plenty has happened in the meantime. One of those things is that the Girl has spent the last three weeks talking about nothing else but a tiny bulldog figurine sitting under a little roof. Apparently, it looks like a “Christmas bulldog in a nativity scene,” and Hydra desperately needs it as part of her holiday decorations.

The cursed thing, however, was something she saw only once, somewhere in a shady online ad of questionable origin, and no one could even confirm whether it was real or just an AI-generated illusion she fell for while working at three in the morning with half a brain. So for three weeks now, the household has been filled with emotional sighs and cries as the Girl endlessly searches every corner of the internet for her missing Bulldog Farm.

The Boy’s brain, though, is an infinite mystery. Even though the Girl has described that non-existent item approximately 58,797 times and in so much detail that if I had the right tools, I could’ve built the Bulldog Farm myself, not a single bit of that information made it into his memory.

So one night a few days ago, he picked me up onto his lap while Hydra was asleep on the couch. I’d been getting tangled in her hair like a little bat, so he wanted to keep me quiet. Mostly because he was secretly eating gingerbread cookies straight from the box. He looked at me and said, “We should get the Girl that little bulldog as a keepsake for these Christmases when you wrote your book, Tokki.”

I looked at him in total disbelief. “Well, Traitor, maybe you’re finally growing as a person,” I thought to myself and gave a slow, approving nod, probably the first time I’ve ever fully agreed with him.

That lasted right up until he wiped his icing-covered fingers and typed into the search bar: “BULLDOG CHARM.”

The screen filled with pendants and charms shaped like bulldogs in all sorts of weird styles and questionable designs. I stared at him again, even more incredulous this time, wondering if he was joking or genuinely thought this was a good idea.

When I saw his innocent face carefully picking through Bulldog Charms instead of the Bulldog Farm, I silently began saying goodbye to him. Because once Hydra opened her gift,  a deformed wooden bulldog silhouette on a necklace with the words “We found your bulldog!” the Boy was either getting kicked out or buried, depending on her reflexes that day.

I tried to warn him with growls and intense tail wagging that what he was doing was dangerous and that this would not end well. But he kept scrolling through endless pages of charms, bookmarking the ugliest ones with a thoughtful, “Hmm, maybe this one.” “Maybe this one” will be the reason you die, I thought to myself as I looked at those hideous parodies of a handsome bulldog like me.

After two hours of painful searching, the winner was still a chunk of wood hanging on a chain. Hydra will definitely never forget these Christmases, and maybe we should just put a therapy gift card under the tree along with it so she can process the trauma.

But then, the universe decided to intervene. Through the mighty power of internet algorithms, it showed the Boy an ad from www.olivie.cz and there it was, the most adorable Bulldog Charm I’d seen in the last two and a half hours.

“Buy it! Mighty paw, buy it now! Just don’t go back to that wooden monstrosity!” I sent him telepathic messages and even barked to confirm that this might not be the Bulldog Farm, but it was definitely a beautiful Bulldog Charm, and with this one, he could actually pull it off like a hero.

The Boy hesitated only for a moment, then said, “It’s fate! There’s even a 30% discount, and it comes in Hydra’s favorite green and silver, true Slytherin colors, she’ll love it!” And just like that, he secured himself a few extra years of life.