The Worst Owner Yet!

"Matchstick!" I ran to the shoreline, wading in up to my shins, Snowball and Fence right behind me. "What are you doing out there? What are you doing here?"

A million questions were running through my head at a million miles an hour, some of the more critical ones being:

Had Matchstick followed us all the way to the beach? What was going on? Why was he here? What was about to ensue? And, wait, did I really smell like a chupacabra who only bathed once every two months like P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 had said? I sniffed my pits, trying and probably failing to be discreet about it.

The stench almost made me pass out again.

Ok. A long, hot shower was definitely in order once I got home. But at the moment, I had more pressing issues to confront. For instance: whatever the heck was behind Matchstick's sudden and inexplicable appearance at Waxing Bay.

He was out in the middle of the semicircular bay, just floating there on a surfboard. He was the only pet still in the water. All the rest, and their owners, were looking on from the shore.

"Surprised to see me?" Matchstick's voice boomed out like he was speaking into a megaphone, way louder than you'd think his small frame would be capable of.

Wait… "speaking???"

How was Matchstick speaking?

Chupacabras can't talk!

"Oh, nice!" Snowball looked surprised.

"What's nice?"

"See that apparatus?" she pointed at Matchstick, shielding her eyes from the sun to look out at the water. "The one attached to his muzzle?"

I saw it, alright. And I didn't just see it. I was practically blinded by it. "OH GOD MY EYES!" I recoiled in pain. Whatever Matchstick had stuck to his face, it was so bright and shiny that one look at it was about enough to fry your optic nerves. "What is that?!"

"That's my Petz-2-Speech 9000.01 💖! Remember?"

"Oh, right. That thing."

It was one of Snowball's latest inventions. Its purpose was to convert the thoughts of pets into speech. It didn't work on just any old animal. It only worked on pets.

Like most of her wacky devices, it was covered front and back with reflective sequins.

"Owowowowow, not again!" I yelped as I made the same mistake twice and let my eyes land right on Matchstick's tech-equipped maw again.

"'Oh, right. That thing?' Is that all you have to say? This is fantastic! This means it actually works."

Snowball had previously done some test runs of the device on Fence's goldfish. But all those tests ever showed was that the only thing they ever thought about was solutions to the 2038 problem. So eventually Snowball called the project a bust, labeled the Petz-2-Speech 9000.01 💖 a failure, and chucked the thing in the back of my closet.

Where, it seemed, Matchstick had found it.

"Matchstick!" I called out. "What… what are you doing here? Why are you…? Why are…?"

"OH? Words failing you, owner of mine? Ha! I guess now the shoe's on the other foot, isn't it?" I wasn't wearing any shoes, and neither was Matchstick for that matter, but this definitely wasn't the best time to point that out. He seemed serious. "Now I'm the one who can speak. So just stand there stupefied and listen!"

He knew me too well. It was all I could do.

"Everyone else, listen up too! I want all the pets and owners present today to listen to my tale! The sad, sorry story of a chupacabra unloved!

That was when Matchstick launched into it. Like a water balloon filled too full, he was bursting all at once. Letting everything he'd been bottling up inside out in a great, big flood of emotion.

"It all started just a few months ago. At the time I was just a tiny little chupacabra larva, new to the world, barely out of the petri dish where I was grown."

Huh, I thought. So baby chupacabras are called larvae. The more you know.

Wait, now wasn't the time!

"All I wanted in all the world was the simple pet life. To be a good chupacabra to a good chupacabra owner. One who would walk me. Feed me. Scratch behind my ears. Call me a good boy when I brought the shriveled, blood-drained remains of small and/or large prey to the doorstep. What I wanted — all I wanted — was an owner who would love me for the chupacabra I was. An owner I could love in return… But what do I get?!?!?!"

Matchstick lanced an accusatory finger at me.

"Him!"

Literally everyone on the entire beach turned to me and gasped.

Including Snowball and Fence. Aw, come on, guys! What gives?

"Do you all want to know," Matchstick asked the crowd passionately, the fire inside him building and building into a roaring conflagration of anger and resentment, "what my first memory is? Well, I'll tell you. It's of being tossed over his shoulder! Treated as so much trash. As garbage. As nothing more than a mild amusement to be toyed with for as long as his minuscule attention span deemed fit and then discarded. What do I mean? Here's what I mean. 'Eh. Thanks, I guess.' Those were his exact words the day he first met me. His exact noncommittal utterance the day Mommy first gifted me — still growing in the petri dish that was my cradle — to him and he took one sideways look at me and tossed me over his shoulder onto a pile of dirty socks!"

The crowd gasped again. All I could do was hang my head in shame. It was all true. All of it.

When Snowball first gifted Matchstick to me, I wasn't appreciative at all. A petri dish filled with what would eventually grow into a full-sized chupacabra wasn't exactly my idea of a great gift. And though I did promise Snowball that I would take care of Matchstick, I was never truly committed to the whole idea of having a pet of my own. That was the case the day I first met Matchstick — met him without even realizing the tiny bundle of genetically engineered cryptid cells in that dish was sentient — and it had been true since.

So I metaphorically tossed the whole situation — and literally tossed Matchstick's dish — over my shoulder

At the time, Matchstick didn't look like anything more than an oddly discolored lump of algae. Like an amoeba grown to super size or something, lightly pulsating.

So at the end of the day, could you blame me for what I had done?

Matchstick apparently thought so.

And the more I thought about it, the more I did too.

Matchstick was right. Totally and completely.

It was my first step as a brand-new pet owner, and I hadn't just taken one small step with my worst foot forward. I had taken one giant leap headlong into scarring a baby for life.

Boy, did I feel rotten. My chin sunk lower into my chest. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't look up.

I couldn't meet Matchstick's eyes.

"And by the way, that pile of dirty socks is still there to this day, untouched!"

This time, the crowd gasped louder than ever before.

To be continued!