(This series of articles is about “Home,” however you define it. . . It’s where the heart is. . . It’s where our stories begin. It’s where we belong.)
Wanda, her real name is Shelby, and her man, Dog, he claims he can’t remember the name his Mamma gave him, pushed their neatly packed shopping carts down a dark, industrial alley, a place where big consumer goods are counted and examined and loaded on to semitrucks bound for places, some of which the two would recognize and may have visited in their youth or on vacation with a former spouse or child. As they proceeded, with a bit of apprehension and a bit more of the giddiness of possibility that cheap brandy mixed with a heavily caffeinated energy drink can bring. The alley opened abruptly into a well-lit concrete bowl or turn basin, the trucks all gone, the loading dock doors locked and gently rattling in the wind.
Wanda saw them first, letting loose with her unique celebratory expression of surprise or glee, which was a kind of surreal combination of a cackle, a giggle and a moan, then repeating louder each time, “Yah Dog, yah Dog, yah Dog, look Dog!”
