In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) by Neil S. Plakcy Page B

majesty’s dog at Kew; pray tell me sir, whose dog are you?’ What can we say about this poem?”
    Either Dianne or Dionne said, “It’s a couplet.”
    “That’s true. Remember, we said that a two-line stanza is called a couplet. This is a particular type of couplet—an epigram. Two lines that rhyme, and make a clever or humorous statement.” I looked around. “Anything else?”
    Melissa Macaretti said, “The dog is a metaphor, isn’t it?” She was as rigorous in her clothing as Menno, back in her standard uniform of kilt and sweater. Her dun-colored hair hung around her head in shapeless waves, tamed by a white headband.
    “Absolutely,” I said. “Pope is saying that anyone who can be jerked around by a boss – on a leash, if you will—is a dog, metaphorically speaking.” I guessed that made me Santiago Santos’s dog, I thought with a jolt, remembering my still unfinished business plan.
    “Or a student,” Jeremy Eisenberg said, half under his breath, and we shifted into a discussion of simile and metaphor, and the class sped by—at least for me. I can’t speak for the students.
    The next day I met with the mystery fiction class, which I referred to as my “grocery list.” The students included Beri, Honey, Felae, Candy, Dezhanne, and Cinnamon; I told Jackie I got hungry just calling roll.
    We were reading a Raymond Chandler story at the time, and we talked a lot about the hard-boiled tone. “He’s just so matter-of-fact about people dying,” Beri complained. She was a sunny blonde who wore skirts so short they just covered her butt. “I mean, I know people who have died, and I’ve been bummed out.”
    “But Chandler doesn’t know these people,” Dezhanne said. She wore a T-shirt which read, “Change is inevitable, except from vending machines,” and I had managed so far in the semester to avoid asking her if she knew she had been named after a mustard. “It’s different when someone you know dies.”
    “And it’s different how they die,” Felae said. He was from Moldova or Romania or some other gloomy Eastern European place that had been immortalized as a model or street name in River Bend. It had been built when the Soviet bloc was breaking up, so each model was named for a country and each street for a city. My two-bedroom townhouse, with an attached garage, was the Latvia. Caroline’s, which had no garage, was the Estonia. I knew there were models for Serbia, Lithuania, and Croatia. The largest was the Montenegro, which I’d heard one of my neighbors call the Mount Negro.
    I lived on Sarajevo Court, which ran into Minsk Lane. I thought it was funny that my grandparents and great-grandparents had struggled to escape the real Minsk, only to have me end up driving past street signs that would have read better in the Cyrillic alphabet. It was that old demon, irony, again—like the year I spent sharing a tenement apartment on New York’s Lower East Side with my graduate school friend Tor, paying a thousand dollars a month. I discovered, when my parents came for a visit, that my father’s family had lived down the block for a few years upon their arrival in the New World. “At least you have a toilet inside,” he’d said at the time.
    Felae had a mordant view of the murder mystery. “It’s one thing to have your grandmother die of a heart attack, and another to have her throat sliced.” He was a husky, dark-haired guy, like a Russian spy in some BBC Cold War drama, while the rest of the class would be innocent bystanders killed during a terrorist attack.
    Beri, Honey and Dezhanne made groaning noises, and I tried to divert the conversation back to discussing the story’s literary merit. Driving to Center City Philadelphia later, though, I kept thinking about what the students had said. If Caroline Kelly had been felled by a massive heart attack, a stroke, even a cancerous tumor, would I have felt as I did?
    I had to put aside those thoughts, though, when I got into the city,