One by one Silky is unearthing Peter Pan's plethora of buried treasures ... treats ... soil softened and delectable now, somehow, beyond even dog words.








        

If Peter Pan gets six hiccups, Silky has twenty-six. It's just that way with Silky and hiccups and stuff.




  

Silky has started a bug collection. In her stomach. Along with the bark she skinned from a table leg, the bruised and blackened half of an apple, the hindquarters of something small and dead,  half a roll of paper towels, a potty pad, an assortment of squeakers and a great deal of mole-flavored dirt, "For the bugs to play in," she says. 

The big dogs are sleeping. Silky goes first to one, and then the other, stretching out on the floor to lay nose to nose until they grumble, like old thunder, far off and benign.

  

“Who is this?” Silky asks.

     It was Silky’s turn to choose a bedtime story.

    On the cover of the book Silky found stands a befreckled girl, hands poised defiantly on her hips and orange-red braids sticking nearly straight out from either side of her head. She wears a broad, mischievous grin, a monkey on her shoulder, and enormous black and dilapidated shoes on her feet, that may or may not have once belonged to a Pirate.

     “This,” I tell Silky, “is a most adventuresome girl, to whom the rules of man have never managed to apply themselves.” 

     “What does that mean?” Silky asks.

    “It means, little angel, that she is a great deal like you."

      Silky's eyes widen. She's terribly fond of herself and anything like her. 

     "This one then," Silky says of the book, and off we go to bed. 

     I suspect we'll be adding Longstockings to someone's name soon.  

You know those fidgety, distractable children in school, who don't seem to be learning anything at all, until they're tested, and then they end up being super geniuses and stuff, knowing everything that was taught to them and more? I think Silky Joe is one of those children.     

Silky is just that. She shines, black as a crow but for her long tan socks, muzzle and smudged on brows. 

Four months, Dr. Miller says she is, twenty-three pounds. 

She stands tall and still on the high metal table as he listens to her heart beat.

"Good girl, Silky," I tell her, "Good girl."

Silky wags only the very tip of her tail. She beams though, with pride at my praise, her eyes sparkle at the sound of her new name. 

"She'll make somebody a fine dog," Dr. Miller says, having finished his examination. "Somebody." And he shoots me a wink, because we both have a good idea of who that somebody is going to be.