Hair, hair, and more hair.  Nothing but piles of black, itch-inducing, yucky fur littering the carpet in the living room, and that was only from the daily brushing.
The hair was never-ending. It covered my clothes in a thick layer of doggy wool. The coffee-colored carpet looked more like the pattern of a black-and-brown cow’s fur.  Even the slick leather of my couch wasn’t able to escape the static generated by my dog’s fur.
“How do I manage to do this every day?” I grumbled to myself as I got up to get the vacuum from the closet.  “I should’ve never gotten a mutt with German Shepherd in him.  I’m spending cash more in vacuum bags than I am in food.”  Those things were expensive, too. Buying a barely working 1980’s vacuum for twenty bucks at Goodwill ended up being the worst financial mistake ever, because it cost twenty bucks for a single bag to fit it.  Who would even want to sell vintage vacuum bags nowadays?  “You’re ruining my life, dog.”
My dog flopped his big fat belly onto the couch and barked playfully in response, and I rolled my eyes.
“Do you hear me, Bogey?  You’re sending me down a slippery slope to bankruptcy.”  I plugged the vacuum into the wall and flipped on the switch, quickly sending a good square foot of doggy hair into the vacuum.  Bogey immediately began to snarl at the thing; I’m sure he believed it was some kind of sucking vortex of despair, damning his furry essence into hell.  He was so terrified of it that, before I could tug the rusty thing away from him, he ripped a hole right through the vacuum bag, sending a whirlwind of canine fluff into our already filthy home.  I didn’t have time to react with anything but a shriek as my surroundings were blurred by a cloud of dust and hair.  Covering my mouth and nose, I nearly knocked the vacuum over, which forced a yelp from Bogey across the room.
When the dust finally settled, I collapsed onto the couch.  After I finished plucking the disgusting fur from my mouth and eyes, my last inch of will exhausted, I felt the heavy, panting head of my dog land itself onto my knee.
Glancing down at him, his big brown eyes said one thing: “That was fun, right?”
Sighing in exasperation, I pulled on his old dopey paw gently, his signal that I’ve given him permission to sit next to me on the couch (the only trick I’d managed to drill into his head). He jumped up, bringing up enough shedded fur to cover his whole pot belly.  He rolled onto his back, plopping his head into my lap, and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at this stupid mutt.  He gave me nothing but trouble every minute of the day. (I couldn’t ever get rid of this big lug.)
I started wiping the extra fluff from his tummy, letting it all fly onto my lap.  I figured I could make Bogey a sibling of the same size just from the hair on the couch.
But that idea wouldn’t leave my head.  “My vacuum’s broken, so I’m stuck with the fur…”  I looked down at Bogey, whose ears were sticking up in curiosity at my sudden speaking.  “Bogey, do you want a brother?”
He quickly rolled onto his stomach, panting happily up at me.  He probably didn’t even hear the word “brother” and assumed I was giving him a treat.  I laughed anyway.
I started gathering up all the fur I could find within reach of my spot on the couch.  After making the couch and the floor around us spotless, I found myself face-to-face with a pile of fur about as tall as I.
Why was I doing this?  I don’t know.  Maybe I was having a creativity withdrawal.  Maybe the constant dog smell around the house was going to my head.  Either way, within ten minutes I had created a perfect, to-scale sculpture of my furry friend, made from his own hair… Okay, I wasn’t too great at building hair sculptures.  It definitely wasn’t my usual medium of choice, but it looked accurate enough.
Something about the face threw me off, though.  I reached up, planning to adjust one of the ears of the fake hair-dog, when suddenly a pair of sharp canine teeth sank into my hand.
It took a moment for me to register the violent barking coming from Bogey beside me before I finally shrieked in pain, ripping my hand away from the fake dog’s mouth.
The blood dripping from his snarling teeth told me that the dog definitely wasn’t fake.