#99Word Stories; Dog in the Desert

The April 3, 2023 99-word story challenge from Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch is to:  In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about a dog in the desert. Why is the dog there? Who else is involved? Is there a deeper metaphor you can make of the desert? Go where the prompt leads! Submit by April 8, 2023.

This is a second take on the prompt. I’ve been thinking more about deserts and this prompt. There are dogs in the desert, because there are people in the desert. People go into the harshest areas of the southwest desert every day, if they make it across the southern border.

Why Indeed? by D. Avery

Why indeed would there be a dog in the desert?

The desert can be a fatally dangerous environment; if a dog is in the desert there’s likely a human involved.

Maybe the human is from Customs & Border Patrol, the dog searching for drugs, weapons, or people. But CBP notes that deserts are inhospitable and people dangerous, so they’ve developed robotic dogs, further dehumanizing these operations.

Maybe there’s a real dog with its human, searching the desert for the remains of the thousands of migrants who die in the desert. This dog’s human knows these people had family too.

A robot dog operating alongside ATVs in the southwest U.S. 

Photo: Courtesy Ghost Robotics. 

Links:

robotic dogs     dehumanizing

human, volunteering    

chased to die in the desert

Be sure to go to Carrot Ranch to read the complete “Impossibly Blue” collection from last week‘s challenge.