Excerpt from The Road Towards Home

        

I

          There was a new resident at Clarion Court.   Noah normally didn’t pay attention to the arrival of newcomers, but he couldn’t miss this one because she was accompanied by one of the biggest dogs he’d ever seen. Dog owners could live only in first floor apartments, which had french doors opening straight outside so they could take their beasts for walks without menacing the other tenants. Cat owners—Noah was one—and the petless could live on the 2nd and 3rd floors. The downside of an upper floor was getting stuck making small talk if someone joined you in the elevator. The upside was you got a balcony. High enough so you had a view over the conservation land with a meandering river – polluted perhaps, but scenic nevertheless, from the distance. (If you had the misfortune to be on the east side you looked out over the parking lot.) The west facing balconies also had the sunsets, though Noah feared they encouraged residents who had decided to spend their dotage doing watercolors, and who were not embarrassed, as they should have been, to have their framed work on display in the hallway that Clarion Court—equally without embarrassment, or was it cynically? —called The Gallery.

         Noah watched the woman being dragged along by her dog on the overly-groomed trail that led towards the marshland. Surely the Clarion Corporation when deciding on a pet-friendly environment had something in mind more like a cat or a goldfish. Nowhere in the brochure did it mention livestock, and this hairy Goliath was black and white, like a Holstein.