Ten minutes out the back of the house, through longleaf pines, there is a bend in the creek where a four-inch ledge gives the water its voice. He has carried prayers down there, and fears too heavy to carry back up the hill. This June morning, the drought had taken the song. The ledge sat dry. The bed lay open to its bones, stones he never knew were down there, roots crossing the banks like old veins, and one small dark pool holding what was left of the water and most of the life in those woods. He sat on the fallen holly that refuses to die and stayed anyway. On what remains when a thing you trust goes quiet, and the difference between waiting and being forgotten.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

It begins in a checkout line, with a green dinosaur, a Highland cow, and a rainbow trout in the cart, each selected for a specific dog who requested none of them. What follows is the full audit: a three-foot stuffed peanut that has inexplicably survived twelve years and one interstate move, a setter who guards a small alligator for hours before eating him without explanation, a wirehair whose true love is house slippers, a puppy who prefers yard debris, and roughly sixteen hundred dollars of investment portfolio scattered under the furniture. A lighter one, about the consumer survey the dogs have been conducting for years, and why we keep refusing to read the results.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.

The full essay can be found here: The Toys They Never Asked For

The first time he packed for a hunting trip to North Dakota, he packed like he was deploying to Afghanistan. What followed: nine days, three resupply runs into town, a borrowed knife, a young dog whose paws were ruined by day three, and a dunce cap the camp made him wear because he had earned it. He drove home, sat down at his desk, and started a list. The current list is version thirty-three, with tabs, sub-lists, and a dog medical kit that could nearly support surgery. On the night that kit repaid every year of refinement, and a theory about what most of what we call wisdom actually is.

Narrated by Abram Pinnington. Written and read in the author’s own voice.