My100: Original One-Paragraph Story Hooks 87 and 88--one of these is NOT a hook

The challenge: 100 first-page story hooks in sixty days. Just the first page (or less), and it has to hook the reader to want more. The first is an attempt to get the entire hook into a single paragraph, which is ridiculously difficult even though I've been practicing for two months.

The second is something special. It's a full story for which I tip my cap to @talltim and his comment of yesterday on Story Hooks 85 and 86, in which I talk of a "swearword dog", with "swearword" standing in for "damn". But that's not how Tim read the line--he thought it was a "Swearword Dog", a robot that cruised neighborhoods looking for people engaged in minor obscenity. Well, once he put that out there, I had to make a story out of it, and that's what 88 is below.

Eighty-seven:

Sixteen different impossible things had to happen for Edgar to pull off the proposal of the century and finally get Heather into bed. He did very well, considering—fourteen of those things he absolutely nailed, and the fifteenth was close enough that it might have worked out. But the sixteenth he completely botched, which was why he was lying in bed filled with buckshot instead of blonde.

Eighty-eight:

Jeremiah tried to hold it back, Heaven knows. He wasn’t a bad father, just a man that had had a hard day. When his potty-training son proudly pulled down his pants in the middle of the dining room and let his booty rip, it was the last straw.

Jeremiah swore.

Just a little one. “Heck”, or more likely the word that you use “heck” instead of, but the moment it passed his lips the barking started and he knew that one of those infernal patrolling Swearword Dogs had heard it, reported it, and he had two minutes to say goodbye to his family before the police came and took him away for violation of the obscenity codes.

You could forgive him if he decided he was already in trouble, and might as well go down swinging. “Well, shit,” he said, and a broad smile broke out on his face. The barking ratcheted up a notch. “You know, that feels damn good.”

The dog's barking gained a note of hysteria. Jeremiah walked to the fridge, popped the top off a Coke, and sipped. Nothing ever tasted so good in his whole life.

And hey, Marianne could clean up the kid’s poop, too, since Jeremiah was going away for a while. He flung the door open, belched like an earthquake, dredged up every single profane, scatological, or rude sexual word in every language he ever heard of, and let the world have it.

Jeremiah spoke four languages. And he was an ex-Marine. One of the really good ones.

At 5:17pm that day, Burberry Central's Obscenity Police registered the first-ever instance of a Swearword Dog spontaneously combusting.

The code that identified the offender was destroyed in the blast. No arrests were made.

After that outburst, Jeremiah held his tongue. Things got better at work. Two weeks later, Jeremiah's son successfully navigated an entire day without a diaper.

If only he hadn't said, upon successful completion of the potty dance, and pointing proudly to the toilet, "Look Daddy! Shit!"

~Cristof

P.S. This series is the brainchild of The New Creatives, which challenged us to create 100 of something as a way of attaining mastery of a particular art form (or beginning the process, more like). This is my attempt. #TNCmy100