Hey Mom and Dad,

Just a quick update, Vincent (a.k.a. Bear Cub) has stumbled into an alternate Spencerville where toys defy gravity, secrets are the norm, and I’ve teamed up with a talking Pomeranian general. Currently facing an uncanny upside-down world and it looks like I’m the keeper of its mysteries now. Will keep sniffing out the adventure. Wish me luck!

Love,
Vincent 🐾

So it goes, one paw after the other—I found myself galumphing along the biscuit-scented pavements of Spencerville. There’s something about this town, a hush of paws against the ground, a murmur of endless possibilities. It’s dogs’ haven, they said, but I sniffed more than that; I sniffed secrets tucked beneath the hydrants and tales wagging behind park benches.

It was a Thursday, or so my internal sunset alarm told me—might’ve been a Wednesday, now that I think about it, but that’s beside the point. The point is, I encountered something peculiar, even for Spencerville standards, and that’s saying something.

Lower Golden Gate Gardens was my haunt—a place where I could sink my paws into the soft grass and watch the dragonflies play tag with the wind. That’s when the ground did a thing, a kind of hiccup that sent a shiver up my spine. A hole opened up right where a tree should’ve been, but nobody plants trees in holes—unless you count my past attempts to bury sticks.

A light shone from the hole, which I hesitated to call a hole anymore because it assumed a shape. Rectangle? No. More like—trouble. I should’ve walked away. Would’ve. Could’ve. But didn’t.

I stuck my snout closer and—Lord forgive me for the cliché—the hole wasn’t just glowing; it was calling. Not in words, of course. I’m a dog, not a lunatic. But a pull in the gut is a pull in the gut.

Falling through the glow was like jumping into a lake without the wet dog smell afterwards. I landed in—yes, a different kind of Spencerville if you can believe that. This place had the same corners, but someone had drawn outside the lines. The colors were all off, like they’d been washed with dark socks one too many times. And everything felt… upside down.

My first thought was to find my sister, Princess Victoria, because what’s a possibly misunderstood Newfoundland without his Saint Bernard sidekick, right? Right.

But she wasn’t anywhere. That’s when the strange got stranger. Toys floated above the ground, looping lazily through the air. Toys I never liked, which is probably why they were floating—they had abandonment issues.

And the pickle toy—my stuffed green nemesis—bobbed along like a dancer without a partner. It hovered before me as the hidden treats inside silently mocked my brave face. I wanted to squash it with my majestic bulk, but something stopped me. Curiosity, my friend and enemy.

“Vincent!” a voice barked. No need to tell you it was a talking Pomeranian with the soul of a great general because, really, who’d doubt that?

“Whatcha waiting for, big guy?” General Pom fluttered into view with the aid of his own floating squeaky bone. “The army’s assembling at—”

The rest was drowned out by a sound I dreaded more than ear-drops—a distant thunder, maybe a storm of cats and dogs, literally. We both stared as shapes emerged from the din, pets mostly, but they moved in ways pets weren’t supposed to move. Sideways. Backwards. The wrong kind of wag to their tails.

General Pom let out a snarl, the kind that usually followed his ‘Invasion of the Doggy Bed’ anecdote. His hackles rose like the crimes against canine fashion I’d seen back at Canine Couture Clothing.

“Allies or enemies?” I pondered aloud, not expecting an answer.

“No clue, pal. But we’ll find out soon enough,” General Pom declared with his tiny, unyielding heart.

And so, side by side, a Newfoundland and a Pomeranian as grand in spirit as the oddest of tales, faced the upside-down Spencerville. Whatever awaited us beyond the kaleidoscope of floating toys and glimmering gardens, we would tackle with blended bravery and, likely, a fair helping of befuddlement.

Tales of Spencerville are often tall, but none so strange as that day when I fell through a glow and stood paw-to-phantom-paw with the uncanny. In this town for departed pets, even an ordinary day holds the promise of the extraordinary—for good or ill. And it seems, for now, I am its keeper.

The End.