She lay there on the couch with her overweight pooch held tight up to her warm belly. As she saw me approaching, she lifted her head and, with one hand lifting Tomorrow's paw in a gesture to shake my hand, she said "Say hello to Tom, Tomorrow". It's funny. The way my name and the dog's name rolled together from her mouth sounded quite strange. I shaked the plump pooch's paw, the dog only half paying attention to the whole act, as if to say: "Well, alright. If you insist". I felt much the same way. It wasn't exactly the highlight of my day being introduced to a dog.

"I wish I could just get this bullshit over with and get the fuck out of here!", I thought to myself. To me this truly was a reluctant obligation - the third time that I had visited. I strongly resented this sentence and counted the days til my community service would come to an end. Sure, I regretted having been caught tucking that candy bar under my belt, but I felt no remorse about it. Absolutely none! In fact, this kindly old lady had already been more generous to me than she herself was aware, and her neglected house had become a viable source of income, what with it's veritable goldmine of antique knick-knacks and unattended silverware.

But it was an unpleasant experience, nevertheless, for the house was clammy and claustraphobic. It had that overwhelming odour of mothballs. In a sense, everything in the entire house needed to be preserved, and not just the clothing in the wardrobes. The old lady was motheaten and weather-beaten. She had accumulated so much time in her life, the years weighed around her ankles like a ball and chain. In fact, in many ways she was a prisoner of her memories, completely saturated and incapable of soaking up any new experiences, thoughts, or sensations. She would recount endless stories of the way things were, and the "good ol' days" when life was not quite so painful. The golden years for her were in her golden memories, for the reality of her life as an old lady was a painful and lonely one. A waiting period that she would have to endure until she was finally allowed to die.

You know, the old lady sure was surrounded by an entourage of pooches, all of them redeemed from the clutches of death at the local pound. All dogs. No cats. Granted, they were all of the small variety, but still it seemed strange to me. I guess I had always had this stereotype in my mind of little old ladies surrounded by dozens of cats. I thought that cats were the animal of choice for little old ladies. Perhaps, they in fact are. But not for this little old lady. I think that dogs somehow came across to her as being masculine animals, and so she used dogs to fill the void left by her husband's passing. Actually, now that I think about it, there really weren't any bitches in her little society. At least, as far as I could tell. What can I say? You notice these things, you know. Especially on smaller dogs where they always seem to be dragging their dicks around, looking ridiculously "hung" for their tiny little bodies.

Well, today was the day she would explain to me how her pooches acquired the peculiar names that they had. Let's see, there was Baldy, Limp and Patch. Yes, indeed, there truly was a Patch. I guess there has to be a Patch in any self-respecting hound community for it to even be worth a damn. But Patch hadn't been named thus as a result of any coloration on his coat. No, there was a slightly less savoury explanation behind his name. The poor old straggler looked worse for wear and much older than he truly was. And he had this ugly exposed patch on his back where a severe scar had never completely healed. A nasty open area where the fur would never grow again. It made me shiver and recoil just to look at it, the way I cringe when I see a pigeon with one malformed or mutilated foot. The old lady explained to me how the dog had undoubtedly come from a bakground of abuse, neglect and viciously brutal beatings. It was found alongside a road with a gaping wound on its back, God only knows what type of blow or implement had inflicted it. There in the gutter it was left for dead. But the old lady had given Patch a second lease on life, like all the other wretched creatures in her collection.

Then there was the beagle named Regal, the dog with the very snooty and regal attitude, the dog that none of the other dogs really seemed to care for. And it was no coincidence, the rhyming name and all. The old lady would often call him with "Regal the Beagle, come her boy. Come to mommy. Come here boy". I almost think I observed him once lifting up his nose at hearing the word "boy". I imagine he might have been thinking to himself "Sir! That's sir to you, madam!". "Do beagles eat bagels?" I wondered to myself. God, I was bored! My mind was grasping at straws trying to entertain itself.

Oh, heck! Almost forgot to mention him (easy to do as he's more like a fixture than a separate entity). Tomorrow - last but certainly not least, good ol' trusty Tomorrow. I had asked the old lady several times why the dog was named Tomorrow, for all her pooches seemed to have very carefully and deliberately crafted names. But each time I had asked her, the conversation somehow shifted and she would end up telling me some story about the war, or the time she bought her first television, or something equally as inane. Today was the day she would explain Tomorrow. I could feel it. And sure enough, she began to spin her story.

It turns out that Tomorrow was the first of the dogs that she had saved from the brink of termination, which further explains why she was so attached to him. It was only four months after her husband had died that she felt the terrible loneliness gripping her and swallowing her into an abyss of dark depression. As is so often the case with older folk who lose a spouse, her health was declining and she was desperate to do something to lift her spirits. Her depression medication just lead her spiralling into a vicious pill-popping cycle. The more her doctor upped the dosage, the more her tolerance for the drugs grew. And the more she became reliant on the pills, the weaker her true emotional resolve became. It was a quick fix which was very quickly unfixing the old lady. She felt a false sense of happiness while all the time she was falling apart at the seams. She could always sense that niggling feeling of inner despair buried deep inside her. She had to get off that damn medication. The more she got sucked into it, the harder it would be to break free.

It was around this time that, while trying to lose herself watching TV on the couch, she caught a commercial sponsored by the SPCA. Featuring the most adorable puppy she had ever seen, the ad made an appeal to the public to adopt a puppy from the pound and so save it from being put to sleep. Best of all, the puppies were absolutely free. The SPCA would be just overjoyed to see these sad and neglected animals given a loving home, that this would be payment enough. Well, the old lady decided right there and then that she would go the very next day and claim for herself a companion - a loyal friend on whom she could shower her love and affection which, with her husband gone, no longer had an outlet. The old lady obviously had a very strong need to give love, and like a plant starved of water, this love was dying by being locked up inside of her.

But, now she was thrilled. For the rest of the evening she could not stop thinking about how her new friend would be waiting for her, needing her, and how she would show it such kindness that its little soul had never felt before. She tingled all over with anticipation. It was so simple and yet suddenly her despair was turned around. Just a humble pet would have such a profound effect on her. She wondered about which breed she would prefer, and what names had a nice ring to them. She wondered about how nice it would be to take her companion for late afternoon walks, much like she had always, as regular as clockwork, taken a late afternoon stroll with her husband. She wondered about how little children would spontaneously come up to her while she was walking through the park and would pet her beautiful puppy and ask what its name was. She wondered about how fun it would be to be woken up in the morning with a lick and a wagging tail, much like she was woken each morning with a soft kiss from her husband. She wondered about how nice it would be to sit on her favorite chair in front of the fireplace - with her puppy on her lap - reading a good book. She wondered.........

Well, the next morning came and the old lady had no trouble waking up and getting out of bed, as had been the case in previous weeks. She had a reason to live. Somewhere out there was a lovable puppy that needed her. Her! And when she arrived at the pound she was both delighted and saddened by the sight of dozens of excited tail-wagging puppies, clambering to the front of their kennels and giving her those puppy dog eyes as if pleading to her :"Me, me! Take me! Oh, please, take me!". How could she possibly choose just one, she thought. She looked them over, wishing she could just bunch them all up in her arms and take the whole lot of them home with her. But she did see one she particularly fancied. It was a fluffy St. Bernard puppy - a ball of wool with eyes.

She was just about to call to one of the officials to tell him that she'd made her choice when she heard a young girl exclaiming "Look, mommy. Isn't he just the cutest? Can we have him, mommy? Please can we take him home?". When the old lady turned to look she saw that the little girl was pointing at the very same St. Bernard puppy that she had her eyes on. She swallowed her words. Kept completely silent. She just didn't have the heart to battle with a little girl who's eyes had lit up with sunshine at seeing the puppy. She just moved on down the row of kennels, a little disappointed but nevertheless feeling good about herself. The St. Bernard would've grown too big anyway, she told herself, and there were plenty more to choose from.

"What about this one?" she asked an official, pointing to a mixed breed mutt that nevertheless looked cute and lovable in its own peculiar kind of way. "What kind of puppy is that one?"

"Haven't got the faintest clue, ma'am.", came the reply, "But he's scheduled to be put to sleep tomorrow."

"Well, then I came just in time. I'll take him. Now he will see another tomorrow. In fact, I think that's just what I'll call him - Tomorrow", she replied, feeling now that it had been fate that the little girl arrived just when she did, for if she had arrived a moment later the old lady might have already taken the St. Bernard. And the little girl surely would not have chosen this mutt, leaving him to certain death.

"Now, you'll just have to sign this release and fill in a little information about yourself and then you'll be free to take your puppy to his new home.", the official said, gesturing that she should follow him to the front desk to take care of the final formalities.

A few scribbles and she was ready to leave, puppy in arms. When she left the pound with her "newly born" (for that's the way it felt to her, never having had any children), she was filled with a sense of guilt. She felt guilty that she had chosen the cute puppy instead of the older and more weather-beaten hounds that had known nothing but cold streets and hunger all their lives. Inside her she felt a pang of sympathy for the poor wretched creatures that nobody could or would love, the absolutely deserted and abandoned. She didn't realize then, but this sense of guilt would soon grow to become a consuming obsession - so strong that it would drive her back to the pound again and again, each time adopting more and more hopeless and sorry looking creatures. The ugliest of the ugly! Hence the hodgepodge of pooches that surrounded her and filled her home with sounds of life, albeit rather unpleasent sounds - sounds of farting and barking. I think in some way the dogs had come to symbolize her ongoing struggle against death. The act of saving these dogs from the clutches of death was somehow a self-affirming action which would make her feel more empowered to wake up and live through another day. Another day of having to endure the pain of arthritic joints, a metabolism that worked about as efficiently as a rusted out car engine, and migraine headaches that would reduce the best of us to whimpering babes.

Well, anyway. That's the story of how she came up with the name Tomorrow. So, after telling me this tale, she called me in closer. Very reluctantly I obliged. I was cautious not to get too close to her as the old lady really had the foulest breath I had ever smelt, as if somehow she was slowly rotting away inside, decomposing right there in front of me - as though her morning breath was the breath of all the mornings in her entire life put together. In hindsight, that judge really knew what he was doing when he decided my punishment. I scoffed at first when he handed down the sentence, thinking to myself, "How bad could a few visits to a little old lady really be?". I had no way of knowing. Truly, I had no way of knowing.

So, chair in place and trying my best to put an expression of interest on my face, I listened as she began to tell me of how she'd been involved in the women's efforts during World War II. She was working in one of the factories where they manufactured aeroplanes and bombs and some other military gear - mainly working with metal. It had actually been a car manufacturing plant which had been converted in time of war for military purposes. Well, she told of how one lady had been using a pneumatic rivet gun to do fastening of metal sheets to the framework of an aeroplane. And as the lady was drawing nearer the metal sheet, but before she got the chance to press the gun against the sheet, she accidentally triggered the gun sending a rivet whistling out towards the plane. She was about one foot away from the plane and when the rivet hit, it ricocheted and hurtled back at the lady, penetrating straight through her overall and striking her in the stomach. The lady was in a state of shock as she noticed the blood beginning to soak into her overall, spreading out like ink spilled over a sheet of blotting paper. It was a three inch rivet, and out of some bizarre freak coincidence it was travelling in a perfectly straight path. The angle was so perfect that it went clean into her belly. Clean! The head still protruding out of her overall. She pulled it out and lifted it up towards her face, looking at it in disbelief. Then she fainted and fell to the floor, the blood slowly oozing out until it came to a stop and coagulated. It wasn't such a serious injury and the lady survived but it sure was a welcome bit of drama to break up the factory work monotony.

And then there was a really serious incident involving a lady and a bomb. No, it's not what you think. She wasn't blasted - like so much spaghetti and meatballs - to all four corners of the factory hanger. No explosions were involved here. Just one heavy mother of a bomb. The lady was operating a hydraulic machine which offloaded the bombs from an assembly line onto the carts that would transport them to the planes. For some reason the lady got the cuff of her overall pinched in the lever she was pulling to let the bomb roll down onto the cradle of the cart. It happened in only a split second, but one lady who saw the whole horrifying event take place said you could see from the expression of terror in the lady's eyes that she realized she would not be able to free her hand before the bomb would roll down over her hand towards the cradle on the cart. That moment must have seemed like an eternity as the lady anticipated the agony of having her hand crushed under the weight of the bomb, pinning it against the cart's cradle. And when it happened she yelled out the most chilling shrill scream, that it sent shivers up the spines of the other ladies working in the factory. She went white as a sheet - in shock - not believing that this was happening to her. She would endure severe pain for many long minutes before help finally arrived to lift the bomb up off the cart. And when her hand was finally freed, it was an absolute mess. The ladies that rushed to her side to help had to turn away. One of them vomited in disgust. Two of her fingers had been been almost completely severed and were literally dangling on little strips of flesh. And the other fingers were so badly crushed, you could see splinters of bone protruding in places. The poor lady! The hand was so severely damaged that it had to be amputated.

Well, there were other equally nauseating events that the old lady felt compelled to share with me, God only knows why. I just felt sorry for all those women at who's expense little old ladies derived anecdotal tidbits for recounting in their golden years. Just think of it. Somewhere there is a little old lady with a scar on her belly where a rivet had penetrated her. And somewhere else there is a little old lady who battles from day to day with a prosthetic hand. While elsewhere there are little old ladies delighting in shocking their grandchildren with horrifying stories of how these hapless old ladies had ended up the way they were. A frightening thought, or what? And while it was mildly interesting hearing about the multitude ways that ladies could get mutilated at a factory site - just a natural morbid curiosity - I was beginning to feel suffocated and sleepy, the slothly way in which she recounted her stories mesmerizing me. As I sat there on the chair, which had been pulled up next to the couch on which she was laying, I felt my eyelids becoming lazy and relaxing over my eyes. She was so lost in her stories, she wasn't even remotely aware of how she was putting me to sleep. Her stories seemed to blend into my dreams as I floated into a drowsy state, halfway between consciousness and subconsciousness.

I began to dream that I was in 1940s war time America, and that I was a union official. The women were complaining about the dangerous conditions at the factories and I rallied to their aid, organizing a mass worker strike. Our demands went unanswered and the strike continued and continued while production of military equipment and ammunition dropped dramatically. Finally, the allies lost the war and it was all my fault. Adolf Hitler, the fuhrer himself, awarded me a medal of honour and then summarily had me executed, arguing that the same instigation on my part which had thrown a spanner into the works of the American war machine might someday lead to the demise of the Nazi world order. I woke up just at the moment that the firing squad blasted a dozen shots into my blindfolded face. Actually, what woke me up was the thunderous crash of books falling to the ground (Funny how that happens, you know. Events in the world around you that wake you from a dream are somehow paralleled in your subconscious as events in your dream.), bumped off a precariously balanced bookshelf by one of her hounds. Wreckless was his name. No kidding! This pooch had some serious problems. He would just go crazy sometimes at the slightest sound and would go tearing around the house, knocking vases off coffee tables, ripping up the carpet, spilling the contents of garbage bins as he dashed around. To make things worse, he wasn't exactly as small a dog as most of the others. This time I think it was the sound of the mailman that had gotten him all worked up. He truly was a troubled individual. I don't know how long I had been asleep, or how long the old lady had been aware that I was sleeping through her stories - if at all - but when I looked up at the grandfather clock, I was relieved to see that my term of duty for the day was over. I had once again survived the excruciatingly boring three hours that I had to spend with the old lady once a week for three months, and now I was free to go. "There IS a god!", I thought and saying my fairwells and bending over to the old lady to receive a peck on the lips (YUCK!) which she insisted on giving me and which never failed to make me cringe, I was off like the wind.

On the way home that evening, the air seemed fresh like I had never felt it before. There had been some moisture in the air that day and now the early evening was descending with an exhilarating crispness about it. Even more noticeable in contrast to the old lady's home where I'd spent the day breathing a heavy and morbid air, stale and old - the same air breathed in and out thousands of times, each time becoming more deathly than before. But that was behind me. For another week, at least. I felt alive as I strolled home, silverware jangling in my overcoat pockets. I checked the time on my new watch, the one I'd found in the dresser in her bedroom upstairs when I went to fetch her medication. It was a quarter after six and I would only just make it back in time for dinner, narrowly escaping my mother's yelling. I imagine the watch had belonged to her late husband, but I didn't care. It really was a smart watch. I felt a sense of pride and accomplishement at having stolen it right from under her nose, and so defying those shits that had placed me in this predicament of having to do community service in the first place, thinking that they would somehow reform me. How naive, I thought. And strange as it may seem, I was actually looking forward to my next visit as I thought back to the bounty of diamond rings and golden necklaces and other tasty jewelry that she kept carelessly conceiled in the dresser beside her bed. "How many centuries has this lady been alive?", I thought, for her to be so naive as to trust a busted juvenile delinquent who had the freedom to dig through all the crannies of her bedroom while she lay unsuspecting and helpless downstairs.

Well, at the sight of my home approaching, I felt a warm sense of relief as I anticipated the utterly inspirational sounds of my brother fighting with my little sister, with the two of them literally pulling each other's hair out as they squabbled over some trivial issue which served more as a vehicle for launching an attack on one another than being a real issue in itself. Ah, the sounds of life. And the smell! Mmmmm. The smell of a hearty dinner. What more could a young man hope for? Stolen goods and a delicious home cooked meal. That was the ticket.

But, at the dinner table that evening I couldn't help thinking about the little old lady and how she would be all alone, but for her family of hounds. For a moment I even caught myself feeling a bit of sympathy for her, but the feeling quickly passed. Hell, I had a watch and money in the bank. The silverware I had acquired would make me at least $20 at the local pawn shop, and would be just what I needed to take a trip to the local porn shop. Yes, $20 would just be enough to revitalize my collection of girly mags. The old pics that had once served me so well, now left me low and dry. They no longer had any element of surprise to them, no thrill. They'd become predictable. I needed some new images, fresh images that would wake up my mind as if cold water were splashed in my face, images that would get me horny again and get my dick throbbing without me even having to do so much as touch or fondle it. Clearly, I had been saved just in time. If it weren't for the little old lady's involuntary generosity I would surely have had to pinch the mags, and the creep at the porn shop was no fool. He would kick my ass if he caught me, and then feed me to the dogs. A really mean and streetworn kind of a guy, he was. Pete was his name. And, while I admired him for his streetsmarts, I was somewhat annoyed that, of all the places he would choose to work, it would be my favorite "bookstore", the local porn palace, my home away from home, my place of worship, my temple of titillation.

That night, laying in my bed, I thought back to the watch I had wrongfully acquired. It hadn't occured to me at first but now, thinking back, it struck me as odd that when I checked the time on the way back home, the watch had shown the correct time. It was still going after all these years? Surely not. Her husband had died many years earlier (nine years, I think I recall her saying) and it was one of those old style watches that needed winding on an ongoing basis. No batteries in this baby. So who kept it going? I guess the answer to that question was obvious, but it still seemed so implausible that the old lady had made a ritual out of winding up the watch. Just from my own experience in those few visits I knew how terribly forgetful she could be. Did she care that much about the memory of her husband that she would, without fail, keep the watch wound up so that it would never stop ticking? Despite how forgetful she could be with any other matter, including her medication? As if to show by this act that she would always remember him - he would always be alive in her heart? Perhaps this was too sentimental an explanation.

Another theory came to mind: It was possible that winding his watch and making sure that it always had the right time was just one of those things she did for him while he was alive. Like preparing a lunch for him to take to work, or taking him his coffee and newspaper in the morning, or taking his coat and hanging it up after he arrived home from the office. Perhaps it had just become a habit for her, a habit which she willingly perpetuated after his parting. Who knows! Point is, she was regularly winding up his watch and would undoubtedly be alerted to its absence within the next couple of days, depending on when last she had wound it. And if she found out or suspected that I had stolen it, I could find myself knee-deep in the shit. Panic struck. My heart started beating just that tiny bit faster and all the possibly disastrous consequences went racing through my mind. I had to get that watch back to her house somehow without her suspecting. I had to find an excuse to visit her before my scheduled next visit, which was in a week's time. She would surely discover it gone before then. Perhaps I could plant the watch somewhere in the house where she wouldn't find it for several days, and when she did she would just think she had misplaced it the last time she wound it up.

When I finally fell asleep after much fretting, I had this awful dream. I dreamt that I had been busted and that I was doing serious time in jail with adult offenders, but I was still just a juvenile. And the inmates were learing at me, looking me over with these drooling expressions as if I was that evening's gourmet meal. Shouts of "Hey there, pretty boy! Won't you be my mama tonight?", and "Mmmmmm. Gimme a taste of your pudding." came from within a hungry mob closing in around me, hemming me in. There was no escape. Then, what seemed to be the leader of the vile bunch pulled out an old style shaving razor, the ones you open up with the gigantic sharp blade that could clean slice a guy's head off - like going through butter. He looked at me with a sick and demented look, a crazed look of delight, anticipation, and evil. I felt his stare drilling into my eyes as if someone was twisting a corkscrew through my eye-sockets and deep into my brain. Then came those words: "Bend boy! Whatta ya waitin' for, boy? Don't you believe in sharing?". I screamed! Then, suddenly, I woke up. And not a fucking moment too soon! God! What a relief. It was one of those dreams that you're really relieved to wake up from. So relieved to realize that it was ONLY a dream. Well, given a few minutes to bless the real world around me and thank the god that I didn't believe in, I felt fine and the dream had no lasting impression on me. I vowed to continue my thieving ways.

When I awoke the next morning, the worries from the evening before had not left me. My fear and concern about being exposed for having stolen the old lady's cherished memento were very real indeed. They gnawed at me. And so, after leaving the house to go to school, I went by her way hoping to find her already awake. I knew that she took her dogs for a walk sometime in the morning but I had thought it was closer to tea time, somewhere around ten. I may have been mistaken. When I got to her house I hesitated for a while, trying to concoct a story to explain why I needed to get into her bedroom. I finally decided that I had lost my wallet and felt that it might have slipped out of my pocket somewhere in her house and that I would, therefore, have to retrace my movements through the house the previous day - which would take me into her bedroom as I had fetched her medication for her. So I rang the bell and waited, a little bit anxious to get this whole thing over with. It seemed to take forever for her to answer the door. Or was it just one of those things where time seems to get stretched out, when you're doing something unpleasent and you're anxious to get it behind you as quickly as possible? I checked the watch, carefully turning my back to the door in case she appeared at that very moment, saw her husband's watch on my wrist and exposed me. But, the watch didn't lie. It had really been five minutes since I first rang. What could be keeping her? I rang a couple more times, waited a few more minutes. Finally, I couldn't wait any longer. She probably was out on a stroll with her dogs. I would have to try again that evening after school, after my basketball practice, giving her a whole day to notice that the watch was missing. I hated having to go to school without resolving this issue. What if she found out that day and called the authorities and told them that she suspected me. God, even if she didn't suspect me, they certainly would. I would have to spend the whole day wondering and worrying. I hated it. I absolutely hated it!!!

Well, it turned out to be a long day indeed. Several of my teachers caught me distant in thought, completely oblivious to the wealth of knowledge they were attempting to bestow upon me. Their words were like so much bird song - interesting sounds but they had no language. No language that spoke to me, anyway. My embarrassment and humiliation before the class was the source of much amusement. My less than loyal schoolmates chuckled as I feigned understanding of the topic the teacher had been discussing. Each clumsy attempt to answer the teacher's probing questions was met with a new wave of laughter. Why do teachers torture you like that when it's quite obvious you haven't been paying attention? They just rub your face in it as if they receive some kind of sadistic pleasure out of the whole process. I was sure all teachers were reincarnations of the Spanish inquisitors. They would surely choose the thumbscrew over detention any day, if only it were legal. Would this day never end? It almost didn't but, when the final bell rang for my last class, it was not a lecture too soon. Overjoyed, I sped out of there. Just a basketball practice left between me and a fresh batch of whacking magazines.

But, as if humiliation before my peers weren't enough, something happened during my basketball practice to make an already utterly awful day completely utterly awful - the cherry on the top of the whole stinking rotten cake, so to speak. When I got back to the lockers after that day's basketball practice I had almost forgotten about the whole sordid watch affair. But I was soon to be rudely reminded when I found the watch missing. Someone had surely stolen it. Had I perhaps misplaced it? I thought back to where I had placed the watch after taking it off. I was sure I had put it in my jeans pocket, but it wasn't to be found there. Which son-of-a-bitch would do a thing like that? Steal a fellow schoolmate's watch while his back was turned? I started going through the list in my head of all the guys who might have done it, while at the same time furiously rummaging through the contents of my locker. How would I explain this to the old lady? How would I look her in the eyes and explain to her that I'd "borrowed" her husband's watch without her permission and subsequently lost it. Even worse, how would I explain it to the authorities who wouldn't hesitate for a second to conclude - correctly, as it happens - that I'd stolen the watch? I was furious. I would find the culprit, the scum who steals watches. I speculated that it was either one of the last players to leave the lockers for the practice, or one of the first players to get back into the locker room after the practice who was responsible for this heinous act. I would watch every movement of every one in the team as they dressed, looking out for any glimpse of that shiny gold watch. Then I caught it, a bright flash from out of the corner of my eye. When I turned I saw that it had come from the wrist of my best friend, Shane. There was the watch, in all its golden splendour. In a fury I rushed over to him and gripped him by the shirt collar, shaking him back and forth like you would shake a piggy bank to try and get the last coin out.

"Don't give me that innocent I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about look, Shane! I know what you did!", and I proceeded to wrench the watch from off his arm, breaking the strap in the process. Can you imagine the shame that I felt when I discovered that it wasn't the old lady's watch, after all. Shane was steamed. He grabbed his watch back from me, gave me a look that you'd only give a bum who was pissing on a sidewalk in broad daylight with pedestrains passing by, and then shoved me into the lockers with such an impact that everybody turned around to look. "Go to hell!" were the last words he would speak to me for a long time, and with that he stormed out. Everyone was staring at me, accusingly. And they had every right to accuse. I felt like shit. I still didn't have the watch and it now looked like I'd just lost my best friend. Perhaps this was all some terrible curse cast down upon me for stealing the watch, betraying the little old lady's trust. Some kind of divine justice. I had resigned myself to the fate of having to explain to the lady what had become of her watch when, as I was picking up my sweater on the way out, I heard a metallic clink sound on the floor. Low and behold, there it was, in all it's irritating glory. It turns out I had misplaced it after all. I felt so stupid. That day was hard enough as it was without me doing clumsy things like that to make it even worse. And what about my friend who I'd falsely accused, and all the other friends of mine that I had falsely accused - if only in my head. I'm not sure what would have been worse: losing the watch and getting into certain trouble, or losing my best friend. I was disinclined to either of the options. That day at school was just one neverending nightmare and I would be so overjoyed to blow the joint. Girly mags, here I cum!

After making a quick stop at Ishmail's Corner Pawn Broker and turning a handful of the old lady's useless junk into $27, my heart was tingling with anticipation (and some other parts of my body as well) as I made my way to Pete's Porn Palace. Yes, that truly was its name. It had this cool sign of three capital P's above three capital X's. And the round part of each P was made to look like a breast, complete with nipple and all. I felt a sense of camaraderie as I entered and mingled amongst my fellow perverts. Nobody ever looked at each other in this place, but I felt like one of them, anyway. We shared a common bond, a common empathy, a sense of common purpose. These were my brothers! I was happy to be spending my time here, avoiding the inevitable. Happy to be so close to the rows of viewing booths where I knew at least a dozen people were jacking off at any given moment. Happy to be able to glance at all the explicit video covers, complete with anointed ladies and satisfied mouths. I was getting wet right where I stood. Boy, it would be good to get home and do the dirty deed! I picked out some reading material, some literature for my refined tastes and proceeded to the counter. I hated the fact that all the magazines were plastic wrapped, but it excited me at the same time. It would be a surprise to see what gems they would bestow upon me as I searched the pages. Opening that seal and scouring the pages, not knowing what I'd find, was like a treasure hunt. When I got to the counter, Pete gave me that look that he always gave me. "What's a young one like you doing in a filthy place like this?", he retorted, and then rang up the amount. He didn't care for an answer, it was just one of those things that he said. I still had a little change when I left, enough to buy a burger later on that evening.

Then came the moment of truth when I would have to go and face the old lady and explain to her why I needed desperately to get into the house, not knowing whether or not she had yet discovered the watch missing. I could put this off no longer. I thought about how my new girly magazines would keep me entertained in prison. My trusty companions! Hell, that's all I needed for happiness - just my girly mags, my right hand, and me. I shoved the mags into my school bag. Somehow I don't think they felt very comfortable there alongside text books filled with trigonometry, algebra, geography and history. "Geography and pornography, together!", I thought. What a trip.

As I came up to that house with the overly tended garden filled with the sticky sweet scents of blossoms, I became aware of my stomach. And a nervous apprehension quickly set in. My steps were just a little bit less than sure as I made my way down that narrow cobbled path, pulling down my jersey sleaves to conceil the watch. I rang the bell. The second hand on that watch ticked around....and around....and around. No reply. I rang again, this time pressing the buzzer harder and more forcefully. Just an instinctive response which had no grounds in rational logic and would make no difference anyway for there was still no response several minutes later. Talk about de je vous! Hadn't I gone through this whole process earlier that morning? I had noticed the mail protruding from the mail slot in the front door and bent down to grab it, thinking that I would hand it to her when she finally answered the door. But, when I reached down for the mail I caught a terrible smell that seemed to be wafting up from under the door. It was a nauseating smell, the kind of smell that made you instinctively gag. A smell that was hard to describe other than to compare it to the smell of sour milk combined with blue cheese and a generous scoop of excess fat from fried bacon, all left to mature in the garbage can for a few days. Not a pleasent smell, to say the least, and one that I'd never smelt before. Out of my curiosity I bent down on my knees, removed the mail from the slot and lifted the flap so I could see into the house. The smell hit me and I recoiled in disgust, holding my hand to my mouth. That day's lunch seemed to have plans of its own. After taking a deep breath and bracing myself, I plucked up the courage to take another look. And what I saw came as quite a shock to me. There she was, sprawled out motionless right in front of the door, her glazed eyes looking almost accusingly right at me. I knew she was dead. She had a look of pain etched into her stony face and there was a silvery dried puddle of saliva below her chin.

She was probably right there when I went by that morning but hadn't been there long enough for the smell to really fill the air. But during that hot day the contents of her stomach had probably started fermenting, filling the air with that sick and heavy sour smell. I imagine the process is much the same as curdling milk and I imagine too that much the same bacteria are responsible. Their process of fermentation releases those pungent gasses as a by-product. However, no amount of rationalizing on my part could take away from the sheer unpleasentness of that smell. The combination of the sour smell of a decomposing old lady and the sickenly sweet smell of Camelias, roses, and lavender would stick with me forever, and to this day I will never plant any of those plants in my garden.

After it finally hit home that the old lady was really dead, I lifted my wrist so as to look at the watch that had once belonged to her beloved husband, the watch she had diligently kept in order since her husband had departed nine years earlier. What did I expect? That the watch would somehow have mysteriously stopped just because she had died? "What a stupid impulse!" I thought to myself. Of course the watch would still be going. It should still be going. I mean, unless it needed winding or something. There was a split second in which I genuinely felt worried that the watch might have stopped. What if it had? Even if there were a logical explanation, I think it would still have sent the shivers up my spine. When I finally plucked up the courage to look, I was tremendously relieved to find that it was still going strong, and I felt even more stupid at having been so worried. How could I let my cold, rational sensibilities be shoved aside like that by some absurd superstitious crap! Well, I couldn't believe it! After all that worrying, fretting, and almost losing the damn watch, now it would make no difference anyway. What cheap tricks fate plays on you! At least now noone would ever know that I had stolen the watch in the first place. I wouldn't have to explain anything, after all. This realisation was followed by a wave of guilt, with one part of me accusing the other of being glad that the old lady had died.

But, what to do now? I would surely have to call the police or an ambulance or something. I went over to the neighbours' house and rang their bell. One of those bored housewives answered, apparently flustered at having been drawn away from her favorite afternoon talk show.

"Hello, can I help you?", she answered with a quizzical look on her face and a tone of voice of "Well, I don't know who the hell you are, so what do you want, anyway?".

"Your neighbour's dead.", I replied in a very matter-of-fact way, "Can I use your phone?"

"Oh, my god! Are you sure?", came the reply, while she still kept the door as close to shut as she possibly could, in a somewhat distrustful manner.

"Lady, go smell for yourself", I felt like saying but resisted the temptation. Instead I described how I'd seen the old lady lying stretched out on the floor with her eyes gaping and about as animated as a president's face on Mount Rushmore.

"Oh, how terrible!", she feigned grief. Of course, they had never so much as taken a moment to chat to the old lady so why would they care? I guess it's just one of those programmed responses which people call upon in awkward situations such as this. Kind of like talking about the weather when you really have nothing else to say to somebody. "Glorious weather we've been having lately." being a classic example.

She finally let me into the house and I called the police. They took my details and took it from there, calling an ambulance and the county coroner. This spectacle drew out all of the bored housewives in the whole neighbourhood, like flies drawn to a big freshly dumped turd. Even Geraldo and Oprah Winfrey could not compete with this real life drama taking place right on their doorsteps. There were sirens and the sounds of dozens of people chattering. And then came the sounds of dozens of mourning hounds wailing and barking as the police opened up the house. One of those that entered ran straight out again with his hand sealing his face. He must've been a rookie. I mean, you'd expect a policeman to be able to handle something as routine as this. Surely?

Met by an onslaught of orphaned pooches, the police called the city pound who then sent a van to pick them up. Soon it all came to an end. The body was removed and taken to the morgue. The bored housewives returned to their burrows. The hounds were gathered up and taken back to the hell from which they were once rescued. I was questioned and then free to go. And I didn't waste any time in leaving all that behind me. I rushed home to be amongst living things, my brother and sister, my mother. And when I got home, the first thing I did was to lock myself into the bathroom with my new friends and proceed to slap the old salami. It might seem callous somehow to do something like that after what had happened earlier, but I think that's the very reason I did it. It had been such an overall screwed up day anyway, I felt I deserved a bit of a pleasurable release. And was it ever a pleasurable release. It left me dizzy in a warm sense of oblivion as I floated in the afterglow of an orgasm, slowly forgetting the whole sorry day that I had suffered through - a day which I would try as hard as possible to forget about, but which I would nevertheless end up recounting time and time again to captivated audiences at dinner parties and friendly get-togethers.

That evening, as I lay in bed with the lingering aroma of a burger that was slowly digesting inside my stomach and forcing me to release the occasional belch, I thought about the whole day. Part of me wanted to forget it, and another part of me was compelled to try and assimilate it, to somehow make sense of the whole chaotic sequence of events. I snickered to myself as I thought about how that whole day was much like the burger that I felt lingering in my belly, still not fully digested. I was amused for a while as my mind played around with that analogy. What was left of the memory of that day I could dump the next morning when I took my morning shit, I thought. But, for now, I would keep playing it back in my mind, over and over again. And all the time I kept thinking about Tomorrow. I felt responsible for him losing his owner, his master, his mother, his lover. I felt sorry for that lonesome mutt that had grown like a big fat melanoma on the old lady's lap - a growth on her body, an extension of her. Then I decided. Tomorrow I would rescue Tomorrow. How apt! I would go to the pound and lay claim to the hound. After all, I had taken the old lady's watch and a portion of the rest of her belongings. Why not take her dog as well? What an irony.

And so I inherited that dog named Tomorrow. The decrepit old pooch seems to have an iron will to live, much like the old lady he had once graced with his devoted affection and his flatulence. It's now five years since she kicked the bucket, and this old geezer just keeps on going. To Tomorrow, it seems, there is always another tomorrow. Even though he spends most of his day either sleeping or farting, often accomplashing both at the same time. But, he still inspires me in some peculiar way. Just his tenacity. When it gets right down to it, we'll all spend most of our days either sleeping or farting if we're fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough, whichever way you look at it) to get to that ripe old age. I guess if those are the only things left to do, you may as well do them well. And I can assure you, Tomorrow has refined both practices to a fine art - to the extent that many a date has been inspired to get up and leave at critical moments when Tomorrow, with the worst imaginable timing, lets out a really foul one.

It's ironic that Tomorrow, the old lady's most beloved pooch, would be the one to be saved once again from the clutches of death, for all of her other dogs were taken once again to the city pound, where I expect most were disposed of. In a funny kind of way they would die along with the old lady. She had no living relatives, no children from her husband, no brothers or sisters who would take those pooches in. The sad part is that I was the closest thing to family to the old lady before she died, and I had been robbing her right from her under her nose. To this day I still have this terrible feeling that in stealing her husband's watch I had somehow contributed to her death. This unsettling thought that perhaps she had opened the drawer to wind up the watch that morning (as she might have done every morning before her husband left for work) and, discovering the watch missing, she had panicked - thinking that she had been burgled during the night while she was asleep. I picture her in a state of panic, fear, confusion, and sadness rushing to the front door, ready to fling it open and yell to the neighbourhood: "Help! I've been burgled. Help! Somebody, please help!". But, not quite reaching the door, her weak ticker is overwhelmed by the barrage of intense emotions and she collapses to the floor just by the doorway. All my fault.

And then, in my more sentimental moments, I imagine that by taking her husband's watch away from her I had stolen a symbolic life force from her, the memory of her husband that was enshrined in that watch that she religiously kept ticking, a memory that helped keep her alive, a memory which I had stolen. There's no way I will ever know. The official story was that she died of natural causes. I mean, she did have a bloody heart attack, didn't she? Could I have in any way been responsible for her heart attack? Well, who can ever know what was going on in the old lady's mind at just that moment? Perhaps a car in the street honking its horn gave her a start. A start which was to be her end. Who knows! Who the hell knows!

Oh, and by the way, for some reason (I still to this day don't know what his reasoning was) the judge who had passed down my sentence, suspended that same sentence. Perhaps he thought that I might kill some other poor innocent old lady with my rotten character.

He was probably right.