The Tale of Old Yeller: A revised revision
The following is told exactly as I told it to my coworker via instant messaging service. All inconsistencies, misspellings, or liberties with grammar are intended. The transcript is reproduced exactly as it originally occurred.
old yeller is a dog
that gets shot
outside
okay so its like
say you're building a house right
and you're a bricklayer
and every day when you come to work, you lay bricks
then so when people see you, they're like, there he is, the bricklayer
but then what happened was
the bricklayer also has a dog
named old yeller
which is a way of saying old yellow lab
but the dog gets rabies
so the bricklayer has to take old yeller out back
and shoot him in the face
and then go to work the next day and lay bricks!
like nothing happened!
and then the bricklayer gets home from work the night after murdering old yeller
to find the ghost of old yeller lying at the foot of his bed!
except it turns out that it's not really the ghost of old yeller.....
it IS old yeller
alive and well
the bricklayer shot his neighbor's dog instead.
The next day, the neighbor goes to the bricklayer's house to ask if he's seen his dog
"'ave you seen ole Charlie 'round bout then, mate?" he asks.
The bricklayer is like, oh shit, and obviously lies.
"No sorry, no dogs around here except old yeller"
But the neighbor keeps asking questions. Its like he knows....knows too much.
The bricklayer invites the neighbor in to take a look around, if he doesn't believe him.
The neighbor comes in looking for Charlie. No sign of him, but the neighbor knows something isn't right.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spies outside the window--a shallow grave.
Not just a shallow grave--a shallow dog grave. With paw slightly unearthed.
"Charliiiiieee---" the neighbor began to squeal--but he only got half a breath out before--BAM--the bricklayer smashed the neighbor's head in with, well, a brick.
How did the author figure that a bricklayer would kill his bricklayer with a brick, you may be wondering. Find out in Part III
Part III
Plot twist
The neighbor was also a bricklayer. Him and the original bricklayer have worked together for years.
Never quite friends, they were always polite with one another in passing, and had occasionally shared a pint over the dozens of years they'd worked side by side.
The bricklayer stood above the body of his neighbor, brick still in hand. Horrified, he wondered what he had done--how could he have done this? He pleaded with a god he didn't believe in to turn back time to just moments ago so that he could stop himself from doing this despicable deed.
But there was no god there to help him.
All he had was old yeller.
The old lab bounded into the room at the smell of blood. He was rabid, after all--remember? Remember I told you that, like, first thing.
Old yeller began to lap up the blood and brain on the floor--delicious sustenance for a rabid fiend. This only exacerbated the bricklayer's horror as he screamed and pleaded with the dog to stop.
But the dog would not stop.
This was old yeller's world, and the bricklayer was just living in it.
Part IV
As old yeller lapped up the blood of the dead neighbor, he turned his red eyes to his bricklaying master. His lust for blood was growing, and the old dog knew his master was his only way to get it.
Old yeller approached the bricklayer slowly, paw by paw. The bricklayer wondered if his death would be quick. He thought about exposing his jugular to the rabid beast, but decided against it because that's not where the author wanted this story to end.
Soon old yeller's cold, blood-soaked nose was inches away from his master's face. "Feed me," the dog whispered in a villainous, British accent, of course.
"Wot?!" the bricklayer exclaimed. Not only was his dog a rabid maneater, but suddenly he could speak. "Wot are you on about mate?"
"Bloooooood!" old yeller bellowed. "I want bloood! You will run to town and bring me human flesh! I want it barbecued next!"
"Wot in bloody hell are you on about, dog?" the bricklayer muttered, partly in shock from his talking dog, and partly angry about his crude demand.
"'ow about we git rid 'o this here dead bloody body first then, gov'na?" the bricklayer continued. "Then ye can have ye damn bollocks barbecue, awlright?"
"This is acceptable," old yeller angrily growled. "I shall begin digging a proper grave in the garden. Bring the corpse when you are prepared to do so."
Part V: A Bricklayer's Burden
Old Yeller walked savagely from the room to prepare the dead neighbor's grave. A plot next to his faithful hound, Yeller thought. A final resting place too good for the scoundrel, who had prowled much too far into he and his master's business. Perhaps Yeller would later poop on the grave, to show his final distaste for the dirty gossip.
The bricklayer still stood above the body of his neighbor and colleague, still baffled and upset by the murder he had committed--and confused by his talking, rabid dog, who had turned out to actually be pretty mean. Old Yeller had a much nicer sounding voice in his head. He regretted knowing that rabies gave dogs the ability to talk. Maybe one day he would alert local veterinary authorities to this.
He grabbed a sheet from the cupboard, a nice, flower-printed set the bricklayer had picked out from a Better Homes and Gardens catalog. He reckoned his neighbor would approve of it as a shroud--he remembered seeing his neighbor cross-dress once, and he had chosen a flower-printed dress as his adornment on that occasion.
The bricklayer decided the easiest way to move the body himself would be to wrap it in the sheet like a burrito at Chipotle, and then drag it out. He attempted this multiple times, only to unfurl the body back onto the floor after a bout of tugging, as if he were merely a rookie burrito maker at Chipotle.
He realized after some stress that he was better off thinking of the body as taco meat, not as burrito filling. Now, folding the bloody and brain-y sheet properly around the corpse, he was able to use his body weight to tug it outside.
It was a much more tiresome process than the bricklayer had anticipated--burrito, taco, nachos--he was now sweaty, a bit bloody, and very uncomfortable with the situation. And to boot, the bricklayer was very, very mad at his dog.
Part VI: The Constable’s Conclusion
The bricklayer had finally, successfully, dragged the taco corpse to the garden. Which--to clarify--is not an actual taco, but instead a dead body wrapped taco-style in a sheet. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page here. I get that food metaphors in a dark tale about a brain-bashing bricklayer and his man-eating, rabid dog are a bad idea, kind of gross, and I hope that you don’t think about it next time you eat Chipotle. And if you do, I mean, you know. What can you do?
By the time the bricklayer had made his way to the grave Old Yeller dug for the neighbor, the dog had already killed 14 more people--Julie, Kyle, Jennifer, Matt, Clarence, Jason, Rizaldy, Melissa, Chelsea, Eric, Mansoor, Andy, Carlos and Tim. It was absolute carnage. All children--all pure, with their whole lives ahead of them--dead by the jaws of the rabid hound. The astounded bricklayer choked on his horror.
“Wot ‘ave you done, mate!” he cried. “Wot in the bloody ‘ell! You’ve gotten blood and brain all over me apples and pears! Stairs!” he wailed and wailed into the night. He turned to reason with the rabid beast, expecting his eyes to meet the dapper British villain version of Old Yeller, but instead, what he saw was much, much worse.
Old Yeller had become more rabid by the moment. Now, the dog was too rabid. Oh my god, so rabid, just imagine it: foaming, frothing mouth filled with sharp yellow teeth, flecked the flesh, bone, and blood of his victims. The bricklayer knew it was too late to try and reason with the beast. The rabid dog, who was previously calculated and conniving in his endeavors, and had a cool voice like Benedict Cumberbatch, was now a blithering fool barely capable of controlling his own movements, like Ozzy Osbourne. A totally gross descent, and how quickly. It’s almost as if the author became super eager to wrap this up.
And that’s where I come in. I bet you’re wondering -- **record screech**-- how did I get here? Well, let me start from the beginning. I became the constable of Higher Dunhamshire back in the eighties. It was a big come up for me--I had just moved there from Los Angeles, and man, the seventies were really wild, and I was never sure I would get back on track. But with a little hard work and pulling myself up by my bootstraps, I was able to bribe some records clerks and give myself a clean record. Then, there I was, Constable Prince Phillip. It was great, I was so British. Well, anyway. Back to what I was saying.
I came across the savage scene: that old bricklayer and his disgusting dog, and the dead, mangled bodies of 15 innocents. I came right up and immediately shot the shit out of the dog, I mean, I love animals, but holy shit! What can you expect? For sure, like, for SURE if I didn’t shoot him first, he would’ve eaten me. I felt bad after I did it though, so I pet the dog’s dead body. But dude, then I got rabies and it totally sucked. I had to get so many shots, but whatever. I injected worse shit into myself back in the Viper Room in ‘77 anyway, you know?
So, the bricklayer starts freaking out and grabbing on to me and telling me his whole story. It sounded pretty much like bullshit, but it was a good story and I liked his accent, so I listened. That’s where I got this from! Anyway, the bricklayer was found guilty of mass murder, and is now serving life. So I guess that’s what happens when you bring up old yeller as a metaphor in meetings--you get a story like this.
