I’m not good at telling made up stories; Der Bingle can do it, but mine have no cleverness to them. So this is not a story; this is just me typing non-true fact-like things into sentences and seeing where they go. At this point, I am about ready to begin with See Spot run, but I believe that has been done before and, besides, Spot’s name never was Spot. Unless you count what we called him before we gave him a name, and then, that’s shaky, because Jane had a problem saying the letter “s” and called him Pot.

For awhile we all called him Pot. Then we called him Harry and Harry doesn’t run a lot. Harry tears around like a dervish and he barks. Harry is not the most popular dog in the neighborhood; he is also not the most unpopular dog. That would be Chablis who is ugly and human. One older man saw her sitting on her porch steps one day and growled, “What a dog!” to a much young man – a teenager in fact.  He thought the expression was coolly retro and, thus, Chablis the Dog appeared in whispered comments – some less whispered than others.

Then the whispering stopped because Chablis got married to a truck driver. No one expected it; for 15 years, Chablis had been living alone in the corner house on Horace Street and then all of a sudden there was this 40-year-old woman and her 35 year old truck driver husband living there. It was unsettling, although lots of people who hadn’t done more than nod when necessary, were suddenly bringing her little token wedding gifts.

Chablis may have been ugly, but she wasn’t stupid and she knew darn well everyone who had looked down on her before were now sniffing around to find out the who what where when and, of course, why. She lied to everyone, altering details as they do in spy stories to ferret out who is the mole, or in this case, the biggest gossip. The mole had always been on Chablis’ right cheek – the facial one. But that is neither here nor there; well, it is there, but it’s not important to the story, which this is not.

This is simply a long, drawn out way to get around to mentioning that the police came to the corner house on Horace Street the Wednesday after Chablis had not shown up for work for two days.