Sam heard this word and some chuckling as he finally woke fully a few days later. He winced in pain, but it wasn’t the searing pain on the street from before. He looked down at his body, which was almost completely swaddled in bandages. He looked up to see a man fiddling with the lengths of twine, holding on to something that one doesn’t normally see attached to dogs: A ladle. Small, made of steel, for scooping gravy. Loops of twine affixed the ladle to the stump of his long-missing leg. “A leggle,” the man said to himself, amused. He stopped chuckling when he saw that Sam’s eyes were open. “Well, little buddy. Back to the land of the livin’, I see. I was worried. Good.” He stood up and looked down at the broken dachshund curled in the towel on his worn couch. “I gotta go to work. You just stay put, hang loose, heal up. I’ll be back at five.” He put on a torn coat and looked around the tiny apartment, dingy but neat. He pointed to the sink. “Wouldn’t be bad if you did a few dishes.”
