A dog barking roused Stupid Samuel from his reverie. The streets were full of chuchos — stray dogs, often scrappy, but not necessarily streetwise. Stupid Samuel considered himself one of them.

Despite his affinity for canines, Stupid Samuel never could differentiate one from the other. He never knew what breed it was, aside from it being 'local.' And then he couldn't tell whether it's male or female. Stupid Samuel never learned how to look.

All he remembered was, that one was Blackie, because it had black hair. That one's Brownie, because it had brown fur. And that one was Whitey, because it had a white coat. Since the neighborhood had more than one black-haired dog, a few white-furred ones, and an abundance of brown-haired mutts, it was very hard for Stupid Samuel to keep track.

In the end, Stupid Samuel treated all of them the same. He ran away because he's not sure which perros had their rabies shot, and which dogs didn't. It's better to be safe than sorry.

This was not like the time when he had to go to a neighbor's house because their son caught chickenpox. The villagers regarded having this disease as a good sign, even though it was contagious. Rather than confining him to his own quarters, his mother shoved him into the same bed as the afflicted, hoping that Stupid Samuel would catch the pox, as if his freckled face wasn't enough to scare people away.

Stupid Samuel stayed in that bed for days, not knowing when to get up, because his mother didn't tell him otherwise. So, he lay there even when the fever and rash abated, and the blisters crusted over, mingling with the other pockmarks on his face.

He likewise assumed that excreting white mucous was also a symptom of the disease. Since the onset of this happened around the same time when he's lying on top of his neighbor's bed, Stupid Samuel believed himself sicker than he really was.

His mother never taught him anything. She never showed him things she deemed unnecessary to learn. For instance, she didn't explain to him that the donut-like structure near their nipa hut implied emptiness or hunger. Stupid Samuel, being stupid, only thought it just was a donut-shaped sculpture.