I get the stepladder from the garage, open it up under the flickering kitchen ceiling light and up I climb. My three dogs gather around to watch. We spend so much time together it’s as if I can hear their thoughts.

“What’s Raud doing up on that ladder?” wonders Hamish, a honey-brown Labrador and golden retriever mix and the youngest of the three.

“This is new. Maybe it involves food,” thinks Franny, the calorically challenged yellow Lab.

“Is there a ball up there?” wonders Huckleberry, the chocolate Lab. He’s obsessed with anything that can be thrown so that he can retrieve it. But some things are better for retrieving, like his ball, which is always nearby. At the moment he’s dropped it at the base of the ladder. “You could really throw it far from up there, Raud.”

As I unscrew the knob that holds the frosted glass bowl over the light, the memory of installing these lights to replace the fluorescent tube lights crosses my mind’s eye. The fluorescent light felt too much like an office. I put the knob in my shirt pocket and lower the glass bowl, placing it on the step ladder’s fold-out shelf where the paint bucket goes, dried blue and cream paint drippings surround it. I check the bulb’s fit. It’s loose like I thought, so I tighten it, then replace the glass bowl and screw the knob back in place.

Standing on the stepladder, I look about for the next distraction, avoiding going back to the drawing lessons on the drafting table. Learning to draw cartoons takes more concentration than I realized. Outside, it’s raining hard. The gentle patter on the patio awning has become a steady growl. Though it’s only midday, it’s dusk out there.

When lighting strikes so close there’s no separation between the flash and the boom, my whole body startles so badly I lose my balance. As I fall, I reach out to grab the edge of the kitchen counter, but I’m too slow and the blue Formica swoops up toward my head.

* * *

Three fat dog tongues lick me awake and I come to sprawled on the linoleum floor. I push the tongues aside and lie there on my back. It surprises me how different the kitchen looks when viewing it from this new perspective, the floor. The ceiling is really far away, a white sky with a sixty watt sun. I probe my head with my fingertips. A lump has formed on my forehead. I wonder how long I was unconscious for.

The dogs circle around, poking at me with their noses, whining quietly. “Hello! Hello!” They seem to be saying.

I’m hearing voices, not people voices, but an odd mixture of groans, growls and whines. It takes a moment to register that they’re coming from the dogs and are sounds they make all the time, but now I hear them in parallel with a sense of understanding.

“He’s moving.”

“His eyes are open.”

“He needs to clean his ears.”

“Oh, I’ll do that.”

I push Hamish away from slobbering in my ear and prop myself up on my elbows.

“Always refusing help. You should really let me help with those ears. Look at Franny’s ears, they’re spotless. I keep ’em real clean.” This all seems to be coming from Hamish.

I look at him, then at Franny, the yellow Lab. She stares back at me. “It’s true, he’s a good ear cleaner.”

Huckleberry, the chocolate Lab, bumps his nose against Franny’s side. “Hey, what about me? I help too.”

Franny looks at Hamish and they laugh in this weird growling sort of way. “Remember that time he tried to clean my ears and left like half his tennis ball in there and Raud had to pick the bits out with his fingers?”

“Yeah, fingers are cool,” he says.

I try to clear my head with a little shake, but not much of a shake because it hurts to do so.

Hamish hip bumps Huckleberry. “Where’s your ball, Ball Breath?”

With sudden alarm in his eyes, Huckleberry glances around himself. “What? Did you hide it again?”

I now notice a lump underneath my back and reach for it. It’s his ball. I toss it to him and he catches it.

Again, I gingerly touch the lump on my forehead. It’s big and growing bigger, big enough for a concussion. I sit up, then, with a hand on the edge of the counter to steady myself, stand. My head is sore, but I’m not dizzy or light headed, though the voices continue as some sort of aural hallucination.

Hamish gazes up at me. “I always forget how tall he is when he stands up. It’s a wonder he can balance on his hind legs like that and for as long as he does.”

“One of his few talents,”Franny says, following his gaze.

“He can throw a ball pretty good too and play catch.” Huckleberry sets his ball down. “I love playing catch,” he says to everyone, as if they didn’t already know it.

Hamish smirks at him. “You’d catch a turd if someone tossed it to you. Why don’t you catch something useful, like a bird?”

“Why would I want to do that? What have they ever done to me, Ear Licker? I might catch a turd, but I wouldn’t eat it, like you.”

Franny glances at the patio door. “No, he needs to catch one of those squirrels out there so we can interrogate it. They’re up to something and it ain’t good.”

“Stop being such a conspiracy theorist,” Hamish says with a nose bump to her side.

I give my head another little shake. “Quiet,” I say, waving my hands at the dogs.

All three look at me.

“Uh oh, look who’s grumpy again,” Hamish says. “I hate it when he gets grumpy. That’s when he shouts at me for cleaning ears.”

“And he gets stingy on the kibble. He even skips the salmon oil,” Franny says.

“He never plays ball when he’s grumpy,” Huckleberry says. “He just sits in his chair and stares at the computer.”

Hamish nudges Huckleberry. “Let’s find out just how grumpy he is. Toss your ball at him and see what he does. If he ignores you we better leave him be for a bit.”

Huckleberry picks up his ball, tosses it at my feet, and they wait.

Their eyes intent on me, I watch the ball as it bounces and rolls toward me. Habitually, I reach out with my foot and stop it from rolling. Huckleberry has trained me well.

Hamish wags his tail. “That’s a good sign.”

Huckleberry bounces. First his front legs go up, then his rear, back and forth like a seesaw.

“Wait for it.” Franny squints at the ball under my foot. “If he picks it up we’ll be getting salmon oil on our kibble tonight.”

“Salmon oil?” I say under my breath. “I didn’t realize it meant that much to you.”

Huckleberry stops seesawing and looks at the others. “Did you understand him?”

Franny squints at me. “Yeah, a lot more than usual. I actually caught all of the words instead of just the important ones like kibble and salmon oil.”

“You know,” Hamish tilts his head at me, “I think he’s just now learning to talk. What a slow learner.”

I pick up the ball.

In his excitement, Huckleberry starts seesawing again. “I think he understands us.”

Franny shakes her head like her ears are bugging her from a too thorough Hamish cleaning. “Nonsense. Two-leggers don’t have the mental capacity. They’re just this side of walnuts when it comes to brain size.”

“Besides, Raud isn’t that smart,” Hamish says. “He’s got to be the hardest-to-train two-legger ever, can’t even get the tail scratch right. I have to keep moving around to get him to scratch the right spot.”

Ignoring their skepticism, Huckleberry continues to seesaw. “Throw the ball, Raud, throw the ball.”

I toss it to him.

He snatches it out of the air, gives it a couple scrunches and says to the others, “See? He understands us.”

“He just tossed it out of habit. You’ve been training him for years to do that. Poke a slug and it’ll move.” Hamish makes a go for Huckleberry’s ball but isn’t fast enough.

Chomping down on the ball, Huckleberry slobbers around the ball, saying, “Give Raud a break. At least he tries, which is more than I can say for those phone junkies at the park. They stand around, eyeballing their phones, while their dogs plead for them to throw the ball just one freaking time.”

Franny moves to the sliding patio door and gazes dreamily out at the backyard. “But dog, wouldn’t it be cool if he did understand us? We could finally tell him what we want on our pizza.”

As if on command, the other two begin to drool. “I love pizza,” they say in unison.

“Who doesn’t.” Franny continues to gaze dreamily through the glass door. “Pepperoni, sausage, Kitty Roca, what a dream pizza.”

I rub the bump on my head, afraid to respond to the conversation I’m hearing, afraid of the can of beans that opens up, afraid to admit to myself that I’ve lost it and gone loopy. Questioning my sanity is about as comfortable as falling off that ladder was. I rub the bump on my head again, finding comfort in the injury being the cause of my delusions.

It’s at this moment that a squirrel chooses to run onto the patio and press his face up against the glass inches from Franny. “Dogs suck!” he shouts, then raises his front paw and flips us all the bird before running across the yard and disappearing into the bamboo along the back fence. I guess some gestures are universal.

Canine mayhem explodes in the kitchen as the dogs bolt for their dog door, but only one can get through it at a time.

“Get out of my way, Ball Breath.”

“Shut up, Ear Licker. You couldn’t catch a mouse.”

Franny shoves her way into them. “Catch that squirrel. I’m going to interrogate him.”

But before they make it through the dog door, I take a deep breath, embrace my crazy thoughts and quietly say, “What do you want on your pizza?”

I almost expect them to come to a screeching halt, like in a Road Runner cartoon, and when they don’t, I’m disappointed, but relieved. This is a good thing. They don’t understand me after all. The swelling will go down and normalcy is just around the corner. And there I was thinking I was crazy.

With the dogs now outside, I go back to the drafting table to have another go at drawing stick figure cartoons, when there’s the unmistakable squeak of the dog door flap. Someone is coming back inside. I turn around. Franny’s head pokes through, the flap resting on her head.

She squints at me for a long moment, then says, “Pop Tarts, strawberry Pop Tarts. That’s what I want on my pizza.”

I hear growls from the far side of the dog door and Franny is shoved fully through by Hamish and Huckleberry pushing to get inside too.

“What he say? What he say?” they both ask, glancing between Franny and me.

Franny steps sideways toward Huckleberry and gives him a gentle bump. “I think you’re right. I think he understand us.”

His eyes grow wide, white showing all around his irises. “Oh, boy, where’s my ball?” He darts off in search of it.

Hamish tilts his head to the side, looks me up and down. “Maybe he’s smarter than he looks.”

I stare back at him. “Snarky comments like that are not going to earn you biscuits.”

Hamish’s tail goes rigid. “Forget the biscuits, gimme tacos.”

“With extra grease,” Franny says.

Huckleberry runs back into the kitchen and tosses his ball at my feet. “Throw the ball, Raud, throw the ball.” Seesaw, seesaw, up and down he goes.

Barking at the boys, Franny takes charge. “Quiet. You two have lost sight of things. He just asked us what we want on our pizza.”

“No Pop Tarts,” I say. “You’ll have to settle for sausage.”