Little Charlie was born under an unlucky star, and though he wasn’t so little anymore, he did indeed come into the world at night.The moon was surprisingly bright that evening, its light glinting in the windows of nearby houses, flashing from road signs caught at just the right angle, and flickering in the rearview mirrors of cars speeding up and down Atwater Avenue, while beneath the deck at number 1900, the newborn puppies saw none of it, their eyes still closed as they huddled against their malnourished mother. Charlie was among them.He took after his mother, though not in size, because she ended up much smaller than him, and not in colour, because she was black all over while Charlie was whitish, with black fur only on his ears and face. He took after his mother in that he was constantly underfed and hungry.But Charlie’s mother wasn’t the one to blame. On the contrary, she did her best to provide enough milk for her puppies to grow, given that scraps and leftovers and occasional handouts were all she could find, and little by little, they became strong and big enough to crawl out of their shelter and play in the yard nearby.It didn’t take long for their family to be noticed, first by passersby and then by someone who called Animal Care & Control, and two people were dispatched for what should have been a routine task, with everything going according to plan until suddenly it came: a shot, a bang, a crack.And while the Animal Control people managed to catch his mother, brother, and sister, Charlie himself, the biggest of them all, was caught off guard by what turned out to be a car backfiring.He ran fast, and he didn’t even know why; it was just instinct, the same instinct that makes people afraid of spiders, but he ran with all his might, his floppy ears jumping up and down, up and down, up and down.The fact that it was late fall and a cold Indiana winter was approaching might have been the worst news for Charlie at that point, except that something worse had already happened: it was the last time Charlie would see his mother and siblings because by the time Animal Control finally caught him, they had all been adopted. Even the shelter staff were surprised by how fast it happened. Not the catching part. The adoption.Days passed, then weeks, and Charlie learned which porches kept out the wind, which bins sometimes held food, and that people were on the lookout for him, but by then, in his mind, every person he saw had become inseparable from that shot, that bang, that crack, so he kept his distance until one day Lady Luck, wearing an Animal Control uniform, finally caught up with him.By then, he had grown used to sleeping in cold, hard places, so used to them that he would choose the floor even when there was something softer nearby, and the habit had left a dark pressure callus on his right elbow, still visible years later.As chance would have it, they put him in the same kennel his siblings had occupied before him, partly because the Animal Care & Control Center was not very large, despite having requested expansion funding several times already, and although there shouldn’t have been any scent left because the kennel had been properly cleaned, Charlie sensed something dear and familiar there, and it wasn’t the warm blanket they had given him to sleep on.The uniform still frightened him, but the woman wearing it gave him a name; it was almost a gift, the first in his life, only instead of wrapping it, she diligently wrote “Charlie” in chalk on the little blackboard sign attached to his kennel and drew a small paw print on either side. Every day, to a chorus of barks from the neighbouring kennels, she fed him pieces of kibble one by one, as if trying to get him used to the smell of a human hand that meant him no harm.To Charlie, that kindness smelled edible.Like the lives of famous artists, the lives of homeless dogs can also be divided into periods, although canine periods are rarely associated with colours, not because dogs can’t distinguish them, but because they are marked by collars.For Charlie, it all began on a starry night beneath the wooden deck, when his neck was bare and he was free to roam the little yard behind their home. Then came the shelter period, when something stung him between his shoulder blades, his freedom collapsed to the size of a kennel that seemed to grow smaller as Charlie grew bigger, and the barking of lonely dogs rose around him into one long scream. But still, no collar. Finally, when Dad adopted him, the forever-home period began, bringing with it a collar of his own and long afternoons beside the blue pool, where every leap made a bigger splash than the one before.The pool, as it turned out, became Charlie’s second-favourite thing in the whole world, right after food, and why wouldn’t it be, when the water was cool without being cold, held him without trapping him, and every swim carried him a little farther from winter? He was still always hungry, of course, but now he was always fed.All the misfortunes that had happened to Charlie before today were gone from his mind, and he wasn’t even angry with that unlucky star, or with the car whose terrible bang had sent him running, or with the Animal Control people, or with anything, really, because dogs aren’t resentful like that and can forgive and live in the moment, so his whole world had narrowed to the rattan couch he was sitting on, the sparkling pool just beyond the fence, and Dad’s terrible words: “No more swimming today.”For the goodest boy, it was the greatest disappointment he could remember. 1Picture1000Words