Hey Mom & Dad,

Just your Bear Cub checking in from Fawn Pug Palace. Seems I’ve been crowned alongside Princess Victoria in Spencerville! In between gourmet dining at Bone Appetit and treasure hunting at Fetch! Toys and Treats (got my eye on a pickle toy), life’s pretty pawsome. Squirrels might tease from afar, but here, we’re all about peaceful belly-rub bliss and waiting for the ultimate family reunion. Give my love to the couch – we’ve had some good times.

Paw shakes & face licks,
Vincent 🐾

In the hallowed halls of Fawn Pug Palace, I sit upon my plush, regal bed—a bed that’s seen more than a wash or two in its time—and ponder. They call me Vincent here, and Princess Victoria lies lazily by my side, her breaths like the soft rolls of a distant thunder on a stormy eve. We reign, she and I, over this land of perpetual joy, this Spencerville—a place where a firmer pet might scoff at the befriending of a feline, but we, we engage in diplomacy.

The sun peers through the stained-glass window, casting a patch of radiant warmth upon the marble floor, enticing spots that make one’s paw pads tingle with the coming of spring, or what one remembers of spring when time ebbed away with winter snows and rebirth.

I recall, quite suddenly, with the intensity of a dream upon waking, the feel of the couch’s embrace back when evenings were for waiting and belly rubs were the currency of love. And when Dad came home, how my vast, freckled expanse would tremble with joy—a satellite dish finely attuned to the sound of his car in the drive.

But here, the drive is ever absent, replaced instead by stately corridors and the echoes of footsteps that belong to no one we long to see just yet. For they all come, in time, don’t they? The small and the tall, the great pet parents, our adoring mom-and-dad.

We dine richly at Bone Appetit, where the scent of fish speaks to my soul—a savory whisper among the tantalizing nose-tales that grace my snout. And biscuits, oh, those fine confections, that break beneath tooth with a sound too decadent for the uninitiated ear. Yet, the Dental Bone, nightly ritual it may be, is manna from heaven for a soul such as mine.

Fetch! Toys and Treats does beckon, with shop windows agleam with more toys than one can dream. But it’s the pickle—ah, that pickle—sitting atop the pyramid of plunder that stirs an inner pup I half remember, half create anew each day. It’s become a friend, in its own silent, pickleloids way.

Princess Victoria nudges me, her eyes a pair of brown orbs glinting with the knowledge of shared history. She chuckles a sound that one might mistake for a snore at the thought of our ear-cleaning days, the twinge of it lost in this kingdom where the only touch is kind and consensual.

Aversions, however? We have them still: the echo of a thunderstorm, the ghostly shiver of solitude that sometimes drifts through our palace halls. I lift my noble head, refusing to let the shadow of past dislikes darken the opulence of the present.

In the park where the leaves rustle with the secrets of tumbling puppies, and in the backyard where the spirit of squirrels yet taunts us from the beyond, we spend our sunlit days. They call it sanctuary; we call it home.

We speak not of the beach nor the desert; Spencerville boasts of none. And the farm, we leave it to adventurers, far braver than I, to conquer.

Ah, but there are tales untold of my brethren, the loyal kin and the merry rogues that whisk in and out of consciousness. Perhaps a dozen more dogs, and twixt them, a tale for each whisker. Ears pricked, we listen to each other’s quiet, resolute hearts, as we wait for the great reunion.

Until then, we reign, gently, steadfastly. I, Vincent, and she, Princess Victoria, in Spencerville—the Crowned Pets—living the tranquil joy of days that pass like the soft closing of one’s eyes, between the memory of a couch and the whisper of a coming joy, both here and ever after.

The End.