Two lost souls

I took her in with the morning newspaper, she’d been chewing the welcome mat again, as I creaked open the early morning door to pick up the milk from the step.

She wasn’t a stray, just lost her way, used to live with the cobbler, him with the shop on the corner.
And I think it was the smell of my brown lace up brogues that I’d left out forgotten
in last night’s dusk that had called her nose to my home.
That sensory memory of a familiar life now sadly gone forever.

He’d died the cobbler, just last month, from the apoplexy, so it was reported.
Apparently it had taken his neighbours three days to smell the difference.
She’d been alone it seems all that time with his ghost.

I put the dairy into the fridge and contrary wise sat herself by the fire with a small dish of sweet milky tea and a couple of charcoal biscuits I’d taken to keeping in a tin under the sink for just such emergencies. 

A slurp and a soft breeze announced her relaxation as her hesitant tail swept the ash smoky hearth, a dribbling snort of pleasure and those soft doleful depths to her eyes.
Two frozen hearts melted like icicles in the heat of the day.

I petted her head gently, nubbling between her brown bushy eyebrows, admiring her gold russet lashes.
Took a deep chance of making a connection, crooned softly under my breath:
‘Who’s a good girl then…are you come to stay…?