Auntie Nat blinked. She looked at the screen again. It couldn’t be true, could it?

“Adorable poodles. Two left. Bargain for quick sale.”

The photo on the advertisement was terribly blurred, but then dogs moved around so much, didn’t they? They’d be hard to photograph. She wrote down the number on the screen and, her heart pounding with excitement, reached for the phone.

Auntie Nat, or Natalia Konstantinovna Lebedeva, to give her her proper name, had always wanted a pair of white poodles with ribbons tied into their woolly fur.

“I walk with them to shops,” she would tell Karl in her heavy Russian accent. “And I look elegant, like models in magazine.”

Then she’d walk across the living room, pretending to be a tall, skinny model with two dogs on leashes. This always made Karl and Auntie Nat laugh, because she was short and very, very round.

“When I’m rich and famous, Auntie,” Karl always said, “I’ll buy you two perfect little poodles.”

“Ah, my Karl,” she’d sigh, “you will have to be very rich. Poodles so expensive.”

Poodles were so expensive, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Every week, when she was reading her horoscope in the Lonchester Herald and on the Mythic Modes website, she’d check online in case someone, somewhere, was selling a poodle for a price she could afford. But the stars always told her that wasn’t going to happen. Until today.

“A long-held dream is closer than you think!” said her horoscope on the back page of the City Gazette.

The voice at the end of the phone line was gruff.

“Yeah, I still got the dogs,” it said. “You got the money?”

Hmmm, Auntie Nat thought to herself. Not a refined person. Not good enough to own fine poodles.

“Yes, yes,” she said carefully, “I have money. Cash.”

“Right. Then meet me at the corner of Milsom Street and Park Row in an hour.”

He didn’t even wait for her to reply. Perhaps the puppies were stolen. Auntie Nat pushed the worrying thought to the back of her mind and, thinking instead of what Karl would say when he got home and found two little poodle puppies in the apartment, almost skipped down the hall to the creaking, cranking old elevator.

The man was definitely not a refined person. In fact, he looked as if he could use a bath. What was more, he seemed to be in a great rush to get rid of the puppies. He shoved the box into Auntie Nat’s hands and told her that the puppies were sleeping and that it would be better not to open the box until she got home. This had made her suspicious, but when she’d poked a finger in through an airhole in the box, she’d felt the warm, woolly fur. She handed over the money and hurried home.

Back in the apartment, Auntie Nat brought the box into the kitchen and sat down gratefully on a chair. She looked at it, but she didn’t open it. Now that her long-held dream was about to come true, as the horoscope had predicted, she realized that she didn’t really know anything about poodles. They were cute and fluffy, but what did they eat? How did you train them? Where, she thought with sudden horror, did they “do their business”?

Inside the pet carrier, the pups were starting to wake up and move around. She would have to let them out. She opened the top of the box, and two sweet little white woolly faces looked up at her and opened their mouths.

“Baa!” said the puppies. “Baaaaaaaa!”