Of death and dogs

My favorite story of someone who knows someone who knows someone that I know.

CJ says:

Short version:

This happened to my aunt's friend's daughter, so I guess I'm three degrees away from this. It totally sounds like an urban legend but ZOMG IT'S NOT

Anyway, so my aunt's friend's daughter is living in Chicago, going to school, and for extra money she dogsits

And she was watching this Great Dane for these folks who were off in Europe for a few weeks

The dog's fine in the morning, she goes to class, gets back to their condo or whatever, and finds that the dog's dead

So she freaks out, calls the vet, etc, they tell her that yeah, sometimes that can happen to a larger dog (re: the total lack of warning)

The vet tells her that they can put it on ice until the owners get back (they were gonna be back in like 2-3 days) and they can decide whether they want an autopsy etc

Various combinations of the fact that it's not HER condo, and the fact that she doesn't have cash, or readily-accessible money, etc, meant that she'd have to get the dog over to the vet herself

'cause their service wouldn't come and pick it up

So she goes and finds a big suitcase with wheels etc and spends like an hour or two manhandling this dead Great Dane into the suitcase

Wheels it out, etc, no problem

The vet's like 10 blocks away though, and it's right on an El line, so she figures that'll save her a bunch of trudging

So she's lugging this suitcase up a step at a time onto the El platform and this guy sees that she's struggling and says, hey, do you want some help, etc, and she's thankful for it because, you know Big Fucking Dog

And he's rather surprised at how much it weighs and asks what the hell she's got in there

And she doesn't want to say "a dead dog" so she makes up this story about how she just had this huge fight with her boyfriend and threw all her stuff in this suitcase and left (which would be pretty believable given her current state)

She's kind of elaborating on that when she gets to the to and realizes that the guy had just bolted with the suitcase

I guess she probably made an attempt to catch him, but he was basically long gone.

And so she's trying to explain to the police about what was stolen.

"Oh, so it's like a pet carrying case then?"

"No, a suitcase... Would it help if I told you the dog was dead?" etc

So basically not only does she have to tell the owners that the dog *died* but that it was stolen as well

I just love the image of the guy opening this suitcase finally

And yeah, anyway, in the end that's basically the whole story, nothing else really happened after that

And I guess that wasn't so much the "short version" as "the whole version."