the cheese stands alone

Bitsy

He found it under the shotgun seat of a rusting 1982 Volvo he bought the year before he flunked out of the university. He was chasing an errant quarter he needed to complete his transaction of a Big Mac and his hand brushed rough softness. He pulled it out and found himself holding a ragged blue ski cap. He never did find the quarter and had to settle for just fries. He would wear the cap sometimes and imagine it had been worn with similar feelings by the imagined previous owner of the car, a daringly handsome young professional skier who had suffered a tragic accident on the icy slopes of the Alps and died in the arms of a beautiful yet mysterious French nurse named Marie, who entered a convent shortly thereafter.
In reality, the car had been owned before by a large family formerly from New Jersey, and their fat, flatulent, perpetually-in-heat beagle named Bitsy. She dragged the cap into the yard one gray November afternoon, and subsequently into the car when the family went to the grocery store and she rode along, tongue flapping in the breeze as she farted merrily. She would sleep on the cap at odd intervals in which she would suddenly drop flat and immediately lapse into doggy dreams of lust. She also carried it into the car as she was being taken to the vet's office to be spayed in a last-ditch effort to combat her persistent suitors, who scented her heat from miles around and disrupted the neighborhood with their howls of unrequited passion.
In later years, as his life and the car both settled into a routine, he would forget the cap. But he would rediscover it when he worked on the old engine, performing an oil change or examining the brake shoes, and he would wear it occasionally at these times, somewhat out of nostalgia for his imagination, and also to keep his hair off the dirt of the driveway. But he never could figure out why, as he lay prone under the car, all the neighborhood dogs wanted to hump his head.