Letters from Jane

BOOK ONE Part 1 In which the narrator, Danny Lunder, describes how he discovered the letters, and in which the first few letters themselves give an honest and intimate description of how one can become left and unwanted on the street:

It was colder than usual. It had been cold for two weeks dog time, but in the last two days, it was worse; the ice made walking painful, and the Master kept the walks too short then. At night, the Master took him around the block only once and did not stop at the playground by the school. Danny Lunder missed using the back anchor poles of the soccer goal and a spot beside the first rung of the sliding board. Jane tried to come along sometimes, but she hated the cold on her feet, and anyway, it was hard for them to concentrate on a conversation with the Master there. So, they felt lost from each other even before they finally were.

He knew Jane was hungry that whole time. She was a small cat, but even so, the small amount of food he tried to bring to her wouldn’t stay in his mouth long enough for him to get it to the door, much less out onto the back porch. He didn’t know why the Master had put her outside at that time but suspected it was because of Maisie—Maisie that … (he was about to say “bitch” when he caught himself. “Wrong species but right concept,” he thought. Well, “cuff, cuff.”) When he read the letters, he saw he was right about Maisie, at least in part. (As must be obvious to any discerning Reader, Danny Lunder is inexperienced in the art of constructing narrative exposition, but before you, Dear Reader, give up in confusion, let me clarify what I myself finally realized on the second or third reading, and that is that the house, which is the setting of the story at this point, was home to the dog, Danny Lunder,and to the kitten, Jane, but also to another, older (don’t ask her age) female cat named Maisie. But, of course, there will be more on Maisie later. Now, back to the letter … E.T.)

He had found the letters some time on the very morning of the same day that the boy and his mother came, the same day ... But that’s another part of the story too, much later. Anyway, who knows exactly which date or what time it was; right about then, he had stopped caring about what the time was. Jane hadn’t been inside the house in whatever time it is that is too long.

A little pile of papers they were—hers, no doubt about that. As a dog, especially a retrieving one, he could identify and remember even a faint scent all his life—in fact, even a scent that had been around years before his life began. So much for time and all the fuss it brings about. He thought he’d heard that Labradors, regardless of color, have even more remarkable noses an, say, your average Collie, but he’d never known a Collie. In any case, when he smelled that particular scent, whenever the day was, he knew the papers were Jane’s, yes, but didn’t know why or exactly what else he would like to know about them. His nose had clogged up with emotion after a few sniffs, and he could hardly receive any extra details. To tell the truth, he was half angry also that he didn’t know what they were exactly, that she hadn’t told him anything about them. He had thought he was her truest friend, maybe even before the human woman, the Mistress.

And he had come upon them entirely by accident: