Franklin and the Duck — the stories

The Mystery of the Strange Noise in the Bathroom

2026-10-10T00:00:00.000Z

It starts on a Tuesday, and the first person to hear it doesn’t believe it.

Hssssss. A long breath of a sound from behind the bathroom door. Then a knock in the wall, one soft knock, like something small has settled. Then nothing.

The bathroom is empty. It has been empty for an hour.

“Okay,” says the woman of the house, to nobody. “What was that.”

Franklin arrives at a dead run.

He arrives at a dead run for most things, but he arrives at this one with purpose, because a noise from a closed room is exactly the sort of event that requires him. He plants himself in the hallway, chest out, and announces that the matter is now his.

Nobody responds to this. He takes that as agreement.

The Duck is already there.

She has been in the hallway for some time, lying along the wall by the linen closet with her chin on the floor, which is where she is during most of the day and which is why nobody notices her during any of it. She is facing the bathroom door. She has been facing it since the first time the sound happened, which was not this morning. It was yesterday.

Hssssss.

Franklin barks at the door.

The Duck does not bark at the door. The Duck is counting.

She counted yesterday too, without meaning to, the way you notice that a dripping tap has a rhythm. And the thing about the sound, the thing that has been quietly bothering her for about twenty-six hours, is that it is not random.

It comes. Then it goes away for a long time. Then it comes again.

And it is always the same long time.

She doesn’t have a word for twenty minutes. She has something better, which is the shape of twenty minutes: it is longer than the mail and shorter than the afternoon; it is about as long as it takes the sun to get from the edge of the rug to the leg of the chair.

The sun is at the edge of the rug now.

She settles her chin back down and watches the chair leg and waits, and while she waits she works on the other half of it, which is the part she likes.

Nobody is in the bathroom. Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out. Whatever is making the sound is making it by itself, on its own schedule, without anyone touching it, and there is exactly one thing in that room that has ever made a noise without being touched, and it is the big cold white one, and it makes it after it has been used.

But nobody has used it.

The Duck thinks about that for a while.

Then she gets it, and it is so simple that she puts her ears back: it thinks it has been used. Something in there is quietly emptying, all day, a little at a time, and every so often it notices and fills itself back up. It has been doing this since yesterday. It will do it again when the sun reaches the chair leg.

Case closed.

She does not do anything about this, because there is nothing to do about it, and because getting up would mean somebody looking at her.

Meanwhile, Franklin has abandoned the door.

Franklin has abandoned the door because he has remembered what is behind the door, on the floor, next to the big cold white one. The small can. The small can is full of tissues. Tissues are, in Franklin’s assessment, the single most underrated food product in the house, and the fact that the family keeps a whole can of them in a room they close is, frankly, suspicious.

He gets the door open with his head. This takes a while and involves a great deal of noise.

He gets his whole front half into the can. This takes less time.

He cannot get his front half back out of the can.

What happens next happens all at once, the way these things do. Franklin reverses out of the bathroom at speed with the can still on, hits the door, knocks it wide, and comes to a stop in the middle of the hallway wearing a small trash can and a quantity of tissue, at which the entire family arrives from three directions.

And the sun reaches the leg of the chair.

Hssssss. And the knock in the wall, one soft knock, like something small has settled.

Everyone stops.

“That’s it,” says the man of the house. “That’s the noise. It’s the toilet, it’s running, it’s been running, it must be the flapper, “

And there in the middle of the hallway, at the center of all of them, at the exact moment of the sound, stands Franklin. Wearing a can. Chin up.

“Franklin found it,” says the woman of the house.

Franklin does not correct her, and this is the important part: he is not lying. Somewhere in the last four seconds the afternoon has rearranged itself in his head, and what he remembers now is an investigation. He remembers the hallway. He remembers deciding. He remembers the sound arriving exactly when he had determined it would.

The tissue is incidental. Every detective looks a certain way at the end.

They take the can off him. They tell him he’s very clever. Somebody scratches his ears and somebody else says they’ll call about the flapper in the morning, and Franklin accepts all of it as roughly proportionate.

From the top of the linen closet, where she has been the entire time, Cookie watches the whole thing without moving.

“Twenty-six hours,” she says. “I’d have mentioned it eventually.”

And down along the wall, by the closet, out of the way of everybody, the Duck puts her chin back on the floor.

He did great.

The Mystery of the Cat Who Will Not Act Like a Dog

2026-10-17T00:00:00.000Z

Franklin opens this one himself, which is unusual, because usually the house opens them for him.

The house has not noticed anything wrong. The house is fine. It is Franklin who has been turning something over for several days and has finally decided it constitutes a case, and the case is this:

There is an animal in this residence who will not behave correctly.

He lays it out in the front room, at volume, to an audience of one large yellow dog who is lying down and one Shnug who is delighted to be included.

Item. She does not come when the food makes the sound. The food makes the sound and everyone comes, because that is what the sound is for, and she does not come. She is already there. Nobody has ever seen her travel.

Item. She does not go outside. Ever. Not once. There is an entire outside and she has declined it.

Item. She goes up. Franklin considers this the most serious of the charges. Up is not a direction that animals are supposed to have. Up is for birds and for the tops of things, and she is on the tops of things constantly, looking down, which is a thing he has decided he does not care for.

Item. When he barks at her, nothing happens. Nothing happens. When he barks at anything else in this house, something happens. A person comes, a door opens, the small yellow one wags, the big yellow one lifts her head. He barks at her and the world simply continues.

He wants to know why.

“He seemed nice,” offers Abby, who has not been asked a question.

The Duck lifts her head.

She lifts it about two inches, which for the Duck is an outburst, and she looks at Franklin for a long moment, and what she is thinking is: oh no.

Because she already knows the answer. She has known the answer since roughly her third day in this house, and it took her about four minutes to work out, and it is not complicated:

She’s a cat.

That’s all. That’s the whole solution. She is a different kind of animal, she was here first, and she is not to be approached.

The Duck knows this the way she knows most things. By having lain quietly near a wall for a long time and watched. She has watched Cookie for years now, from six feet away, always six feet, and she has never once needed the arrangement explained because she understood it in a single look around a corner on a day nobody else remembers.

She would like to explain this to Franklin.

She has, in fact, tried. Twice. Both times she got about as far as lifting her head before losing her nerve, because explaining things requires being listened to, and being listened to requires being looked at.

So instead the Duck does what the Duck does, which is the actual work, which nobody sees.

At 11:40 Franklin sets off for the good chair, where Cookie is, at a determined trot. The Duck gets up, which she almost never does, walks four steps, and lies back down directly across the route. Franklin walks into her, is annoyed, forgets what he was doing, and goes to check whether anything has appeared in his bowl in the last ninety seconds.

At 1:15 he tries again, from the other side, along the wall. The Duck is already in the hallway. She is not doing anything. She is simply, enormously, there, fifty pounds of yellow dog occupying the entire width of a hallway, apologizing quietly to nobody. Franklin gives up and sits on her instead.

At 3:50 he gets past her.

She is asleep. It happens. She wakes to the sound of small determined feet on hardwood and she is up faster than she has moved in a year, and she is still four steps too late, and Franklin is at the base of the good chair looking up at the cat and he is going to bark.

And the Duck stops where she is, because there is nothing else to do, and watches.

Cookie looks down at him.

That is all she does. She does not hiss. She does not stand. She does not move a single part of herself except her eyes, which come down and rest on Franklin and stay there.

The room gets very quiet.

Franklin, Emperor of the Rug, Keeper of the Crumb, an animal who has never in his life been talked out of anything, sits down. Then he gets up. Then he turns around and walks back across the front room with tremendous dignity, at a pace he would describe as unhurried, and lies down next to the Duck and puts his chin on her leg.

The case, he announces, is closed.

He does not say what the finding was. He does not appear to feel this is necessary.

And the woman of the house, who has come in halfway through this and seen the last part of it, says the thing that will be repeated at dinner and again on the phone that weekend:

“Aw. Look. He finally figured out to leave Cookie alone. Good boy, Franklin.”

He accepts this.

He accepts it entirely, and by the time she has finished saying it he remembers the whole day as an investigation, and the investigation was thorough, and it concluded, and the conclusion was his.

The three interceptions are not in the version he remembers. They are not in anyone’s version. Nobody in that house will ever know that a large yellow dog spent an entire Tuesday putting herself between a pug and a twenty-year-old cat, four steps at a time, and got it right twice out of three.

From the good chair, Cookie settles back down into a loaf and closes her eyes most of the way.

“Twice,” she says. “I was watching.”

And the Duck, with a pug’s chin on her leg, lets out a breath she has been holding since 11:40.

Good boy.

The Mystery of the Vanishing Sandwich

2026-10-24T00:00:00.000Z

Half a tuna sandwich, on a plate, on the coffee table, at 2:15.

No sandwich, on a plate, on the coffee table, at 2:16.

The Duck solves this one in under four seconds, which is a personal record, and she solves it by the simplest method available to any detective anywhere, which is that she was in the room and she watched him do it.

Franklin ate the sandwich.

He ate it standing on the coffee table, which he is not allowed on, in one motion, with his eyes open. Then he got down. Then he sat and looked at the middle distance for a while with an expression of mild puzzlement, as though trying to recall something.

And then, and the Duck has watched this happen enough times now that she recognizes the exact moment it lands, he forgot.

Not deliberately. Not with any guilt about it. He simply reorganized the last thirty seconds into a version that did not include him standing on the table, and the new version took, the way it always takes, completely and permanently and in under a minute.

By 2:18 Franklin is investigating the disappearance of the sandwich.

He is extremely good at the opening of an investigation. He does the whole front room. He does the rug, the couch, the space under the couch, the plate, the plate again, and the general air above the plate. He announces that there has been a theft. He announces that the perpetrator is in this house.

Then he announces the name of the perpetrator, and the name is Cookie.

The reasoning, delivered at length, is not actually bad: it was a tuna sandwich. There is precisely one animal in this residence with a known and documented interest in fish. That animal is unaccounted for. That animal is always unaccounted for. That animal has never once explained where she has been.

“He seemed nice,” says Abby, of nobody.

Cookie, from the arm of the couch, six feet up, does not dignify any of it. She is accused in her own front room, in front of witnesses, and she declines to respond, because responding would suggest the accusation required one.

The Duck lies by the wall and thinks about her afternoon.

She could end this in a second. She won’t, and the reason is not loyalty, exactly, and it is not cowardice either. The reason is that the sandwich was on the coffee table and Franklin was on the coffee table, and if anybody in this house works out the second part, then somebody is going to be spoken to, in the voice, with the finger, and there is a version of the next hour where a small ridiculous animal is in trouble, and the Duck has decided, without ever putting it into words, that she is not going to be the one who arranges that.

So she does the other thing she does, which nobody sees either. She manages him.

When he heads for the kitchen, where the plate came from, where the case is, she gets up and goes to the front door and stands there looking out of it, and Franklin, who cannot tolerate the possibility of an event happening without him, abandons the kitchen and comes to see what’s outside.

Nothing’s outside. She knows nothing’s outside. That’s rather the point.

When he starts working the coffee table again, sniffing along the exact route of his own crime, she stands up, walks three steps, and lies down heavily on the rug beside it, and he sits on her, because he always sits on her, and an animal who is sitting down is an animal who is not detecting.

She keeps this up for an hour and ten minutes. It is the most exhausting work she has done all year.

At 3:30 the family notices the plate.

“Was there a sandwich here?”

“There was a sandwich there.”

They start with the obvious. They look at the cat, because it was tuna, and Cookie meets this with the flat unbothered contempt of a citizen who has been stopped for absolutely no reason and intends to remember it.

They look at Abby. Abby wags. Nobody has ever suspected Abby of anything in her life and nobody starts now.

They look at the Duck, briefly, out of fairness, and the Duck looks back at them with the deep uncomplicated honesty of a dog who did not eat the sandwich.

And then Franklin, who has spent seventy minutes on this case, who has built a complete theory, who is at this moment standing directly in the middle of the front room in order to deliver his findings to the assembled household...

...burps.

It is a substantial burp. It is not a quiet one. And it arrives in a warm and unmistakable cloud of tuna, into the middle of a silent room, in front of every single person who lives in that house.

There is a pause of about a second and a half.

“FRANKLIN.”

“It was Franklin. It was Franklin the whole time, “

And here is the thing, the thing that is the entire reason this series works: Franklin experiences this as a triumph.

The case is solved. He solved it. He identified the culprit. He assembled the household, he delivered the findings, and the findings landed. The room said the name, out loud, all together, at the exact instant he produced the decisive evidence.

That the culprit is him does not register as a problem. It does not register as anything at all. If anything it reflects extremely well on the investigation, which was clearly comprehensive enough to include everybody.

He stands there in the middle of the room, in the middle of the noise, chin up, being extremely told off, and he has never had a better afternoon.

They put the plate in the sink. They tell each other tuna’s fine, it’s just tuna, he’s had worse. Somebody says he’s not even sorry and somebody else says he’s really not, and the woman of the house says the thing she says nine times a day, which is “What the Franklin?”

Cookie stands, stretches one leg out behind her at considerable length, and steps down off the arm of the couch, exonerated and entirely uninterested in being.

“The record will reflect that I was accused,” she says.

And the Duck, who has been awake and working and quietly steering a pug away from his own crime scene since 2:16, who could have ended it in one second at any point in ninety minutes, and who has instead spent her entire afternoon making sure nobody found out...

...puts her chin down on the rug and lets her eyes close.

He cracked it. Sure.

The Caper of the Knocked-over Glass

2026-10-10T00:00:00.000Z

THE INCIDENT

A full glass of water stood on the side table in the front room at four o’clock.

At six minutes past four it was on the floor, on its side, on the rug, and the rug is the good one.

THE ACCUSATION

I was on the shelf above the radiator when they came in, and I was still on it when they finished, and the shelf is nine feet from the side table.

This was not raised in my defence. It was not raised at all. What was said, by the woman of the house, standing over the rug with both hands on her head, was the single word “Cookie,” in the tone that is not a question.

The pug was also in the room. The pug was in fact under the side table at the time of the incident, where he had been for most of the afternoon, on the grounds that the side table is near the kitchen door and the kitchen door is where food comes from.

Nobody said his name.

THE RECORD

I will set out what I saw, since nobody has asked and since this is the only place it is going to be set out.

At four o’clock the glass was full and the pug was under the table.

At five minutes past four there was a noise from the kitchen that resembled a cupboard. It was not a cupboard. It was the dishwasher settling, which it does, and which the pug has never once learned to distinguish.

At five minutes and two seconds past four the pug left from underneath the table at the speed he reserves for cupboards, which is considerable, and which involves the back half of him going before the front half has made a decision.

He struck the table leg with his shoulder.

The glass travelled approximately four inches, stood for a moment, and went over.

He did not stop. He did not look back. He was in the kitchen by the time it hit the rug and he has, I am confident, no memory of any of it, because he is not an animal who retains things that do not reflect well on him.

I observed the whole of it from the shelf.

THE SILENCE

They were in the room for eleven minutes with towels.

At minute four the woman of the house looked up at me and said “it was you, wasn’t it,” and waited, in the way people wait when they know an animal is not going to answer and are hoping anyway.

I held her eye.

I did not blink and I did not look away and I did not get down, and after a while she said “look at her, butter wouldn’t melt,” which I let stand.

At minute nine the pug came back in to see what everyone was doing on the floor and was told he was a good boy and moved out of the way of the towels.

THE FINDING

The glass is not left on that table any more.

There is a coaster on the arm of the chair instead, which is further from the kitchen door, which means the pug has no reason to pass it at speed, which means it will not happen again.

They arrived at the correct outcome by an incorrect route, which is the usual way of things in this house, and the rug dried out by Thursday.

I could have cleared this up at any point in eleven minutes.

The pug would have been spoken to. The pug would have been spoken to in the voice, with the finger, in front of everybody, and he would not have understood why, and he would have been subdued for most of an evening.

Not worth it.

The Tale of the Thunderstorm

2026-10-10T00:00:00.000Z

It starts somewhere out past the back fence and arrives over the top of the house about forty minutes later, and by then the household has made all of its decisions.

The pug is under the chair in the front room. Not beside it. Under it, wedged, with his back end sticking out because the rest of him would not fit, announcing at intervals that this is an outrage and somebody is going to hear about it.

The big yellow one is pressed along the length of a leg in the kitchen, apologising to the person attached to the leg, who is telling her she is fine and does not have to apologise, which she does not hear.

The small bearded one is at the window being delighted, which is its own kind of weather.

Millie is in the hall.

She is lying where she lies, square in the middle of the runner between the front room and the kitchen, with her head up and her eyes open, and she has not moved since the first one.

That was closer.

That was further.

That one was over the Hendersons.

She is not counting them the way people count them, with the gap and the arithmetic. She is just noting where each one is, the way you note a car going past, and filing it, and waiting for the next.

The lights go out for about four seconds and come back on.

In those four seconds the pug makes a sound he will later deny, the big yellow one stands up so fast she takes a chair with her, and somebody in the kitchen says a word they do not normally say in the house.

Millie’s position does not change.

When the lights come back everyone looks around to see what everyone else is doing, which is what the house does in the dark, and what they see is the hall and the runner and a black dog lying in the middle of it with her head up.

Still here. It’s a storm.

It goes on for another hour. The rain comes in a way that sounds like somebody throwing gravel at the kitchen window, and then it slows, and then there is a long gap with no light in it at all, and then nothing.

The house unpacks itself slowly. The pug comes out from under the chair in stages and has to be helped with the last bit. The big yellow one unglues herself from the leg and goes round the room checking on everybody, which takes a while. Somebody puts the kettle on.

Millie gets up.

It is the first time she has moved in two hours, and what she does is go down the hall to the front room and lie down again about three feet from the chair the pug is now sitting under the edge of, facing the other way, not looking at him.

He moves over and sits on her.

Nobody sees it happen. It is not a thing anybody in that house would think to watch for, because she was going that way anyway, and because she was going to lie down somewhere, and because she always lies down somewhere.

She goes back to sleep.

It’s over now.

The Doorway

2026-10-10T00:00:00.000Z

THE DAY

She left the room at about four.

She was on the arm of the couch and I was on the rug, a good way off, not looking at her, and she got down and went out through the door into the hall and did not come back.

So I went and lay down four feet from the doorway she went through, facing it, with my chin on the floor, in case she came back.

THE RULE

The rule is that you do not follow.

I worked this out early. If you follow her out of a room she goes up, and once she is up the day is over, and you have to start again tomorrow from further back than you were this morning.

So you do not follow. You go to the doorway she used, and you stop short of it, and you make yourself somebody she could walk past if she wanted to.

The four feet is important. I have tried three and three is too close.

THE OBSERVATION

She did not come back.

I was there until about six, which is two hours, and in two hours nothing came through that doorway except the pug, twice, who stepped on my ear the second time and did not notice.

But here is the thing I want to write down.

When she left, she went out through the hall door.

There are two ways out of that room. There is the hall door, and there is the gap by the kitchen, and the gap by the kitchen is nearer the couch and is the way she usually goes.

She went the long way. Past me. Within about two feet of my head.

She could have gone the other way and not come near me at all, and she did not, and I have been thinking about it since.

THE REFRAME

So: a good day.

I know it does not look like one. I lay on a floor for two hours facing a door that nobody came through, and if you wrote down only that, it would look like nothing at all.

But she walked past me on her way out, when she did not have to, and she did not hurry when she did it, and she has done that four times now that I have noticed.

I am not saying it means anything yet. I am only saying I noticed, and that I am keeping count, and that four is more than three.

Tomorrow I will be on the rug again.

COOKIE: It’s the shorter way.

The Doorbell

2026-10-10T00:00:00.000Z

Somebody is at the door. Five accounts of eleven seconds.

FRANKLIN

A summons.

Let me explain what a doorbell is, since nobody in this house appears to understand it. A doorbell is a person, outside, requesting an audience. The request is directed at the senior resident. It is not directed at the woman of the house, who merely operates the door, and it is certainly not directed at the large yellow one, who was asleep.

I was at the door inside two seconds. I was at the door before the second ring, which I would like noted.

My position, which I held throughout, was that whoever this was should be brought in and presented to me properly, and that the handling of it by the staff, which consisted of opening the door eight inches and saying “oh, hiya,” was beneath the occasion.

They did not come in. They handed over a parcel.

A parcel. For all of that.

I have filed a complaint about the standard of visitors and I expect it to be actioned.

COOKIE

Eleven seconds, from the bell to the door closing.

I was on the shelf. I did not move and I was not going to move, and I want to record that I had identified the caller before the bell was pressed, from the van, which has a particular idle, and which stops two doors down and then comes along.

It is always the same man. It has been the same man for a year.

The household greets him every time as though his arrival is a surprise.

ABBY DOG

Oh, somebody’s here.

I don’t know who it is yet, that’s the whole point, that’s the good part. It could be anybody. It could be the one with the beard who sits on the step. It could be the small ones from the house with the blue door. It could be a person I have never met, which is the best outcome available, because a person I have never met is a person I am going to be very pleased about in approximately four seconds.

I got to the door. I got my whole front half round the door, actually, which is as far as you can get before somebody puts a knee in front of you.

It was the parcel man. I love him. He is one of my favourites and he knows my name.

He said “alright, Abby,” and he knew my name.

DAISY

I was in the hall, which is the wrong place to be when the door goes.

Everybody has to come down the hall to get to the door and I am in it, and I know I am in it, and the pug went over the top of me and the small one went round and I got up as fast as I could and then I was standing up in the hall which is worse, because standing up I am much bigger than lying down.

So I went back into the front room.

Then I thought I should be able to see who it was, in case, so I came back to the door of the front room and stood in that doorway instead, which is also a doorway.

By then it was finished.

It was the parcel man. I like him. I did not say hello because by the time I had sorted out where to stand he had gone, and I did not want to bark at him through a closed door because he had not done anything.

MILLIE

It was the parcel man.

The van comes at about the same time and it stops two doors down and you can hear him do the other houses first, so by the time the bell goes it has been coming for four minutes.

I stayed where I was.

The pug went past my head at speed and the small bearded one went past the other way and the big yellow one got up and sat down and got up again, and then they all came back, and the whole of it took about eleven seconds and there is now a box in the hall.

Same time tomorrow.

The Photograph

2026-10-31T00:00:00.000Z

Forty-one attempts were made. This is all five accounts of the same afternoon.

FRANKLIN

Let me begin by saying that I understood the assignment immediately.

A portrait. Of me. Taken in the front room, in the good light, by a member of staff who had cleared her entire afternoon for the purpose. And I want to be generous here, because the others were also permitted to be in it, and that was my doing. I have never been a small animal about these things.

I took the centre of the couch. Obviously. The centre is where the subject goes; this is not a matter of opinion, it is composition.

Then she said, “Franklin, sit.”

I was already sitting.

I had been sitting for some time. To be instructed to perform an act one is demonstrably in the middle of performing is not a direction, it is a slight, and I responded to it in the only way available to a creature of standing, which was to stand up.

She moved me back. I moved. She moved me back. I moved. And I want the record to show that at no point was I being difficult. I was negotiating. There is a difference and she has never once grasped it.

On the thirty-fourth attempt I was placed on the back of the large yellow one, which I regarded as an acceptable compromise, and from which I delivered what I am confident was the finest work of my career.

COOKIE

I was on the arm of the couch before any of this began.

I want that established, because the account that has formed in this household is that I “joined in,” and I did not join in. I was already there. They assembled around me.

The proceedings lasted fifty minutes. I was present for all of them.

At intervals I was asked to look at a small black rectangle. I declined. I looked approximately four inches to the left of it, steadily, for the entire afternoon.

That was deliberate.

ABBY DOG

Oh, this was a wonderful day.

I didn’t know what we were doing and I still don’t, entirely, but she got out the thing she holds up to her face and she kept saying all our names in the happy voice, one after another, over and over. Franklin, Cookie, Abby, Daisy, Millie, Franklin, Cookie. And you don’t get that. Not usually. Usually it’s one name at a time and somebody’s in trouble.

Everyone was in the room. Everyone was on the furniture at once, which never happens.

She kept saying “Abby, look here, look here,” and pointing at the thing, and I did try, I promise I tried, but she was right behind it with her whole face doing something lovely, and I’m sorry but given a choice between the thing and the person holding the thing, I’m going to look at the person. Every time. I’d do it again.

Apparently I’m a blur in all of them.

That’s alright. I was having a very good time, and I expect that’s what a blur is.

DAISY

I was too far forward.

I could feel it. I was right out at the front where everybody could see me and I kept thinking there’s no reason for me to be there, so I went back a bit, just a bit, and she said “Daisy, come forward, sweetheart,” and I came forward, and then I was too far forward again, so I...

Sorry. I did that about nine times. I know I did.

I’m not very good at the middle of things.

Franklin got put on my back around the halfway point, which settled it, because once he’s on you can’t move anyway. He sat up very straight. He always sits up very straight when there’s an audience, and I don’t say anything about it, because he’s little and it’s his afternoon.

She said, “Daisy, he’s fine, you can relax.”

He was fine. He was on my back. That’s where he goes.

MILLIE

She asked me to get on the couch, so I got on the couch.

I sat at the end, facing the way she was standing, because that was the way she was standing. Then I stayed there.

The pug went up and down roughly thirty times. The cat looked slightly to the left of the camera for fifty minutes, on purpose. The small bearded one spent the entire afternoon looking at a person instead of a lens and enjoying herself enormously. The big yellow one reversed out of frame and apologised for it, over and over, until somebody parked a pug on her, which is the only thing that has ever made her sit still.

I didn’t move.

Nobody told me not to. It just seemed like what was being asked for.

She gave up at forty-one and kept the last one.

It’s on the fridge now. In it, Franklin is upright on Daisy’s back with his chin raised like a man being painted. Daisy is mid-apology. Abby is a cream-coloured smear with one ear in focus. Cookie is looking at something four inches to the left of everybody’s life.

And on the end of the couch, square to the camera, in focus, is one black dog looking directly down the lens.

She is like that in all forty-one.

Nobody in this house has ever noticed.

I was ready.