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[caption id="attachment_8603" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Photo: North Jersey Media Group - The Record[/caption]

My dog, Sissy, has a host of peculiar behaviors, but her chronic tendency to hide takes the prize. Sometimes her disappearances make me feel as though I'm living with a covert CIA operative!

I work from home, and there are days when Sissy and I get up and have breakfast together, and I don't see her again until dinner. I've gone on plenty of search missions only to find her, an eight-pound Yorkshire terrier, hidden under my bed or behind the upholstered flap of the sofa. After 10 years of this, nothing really surprises me anymore. But one day, when Sissy was still a pup, she completely floored me.

A raging nor'easter was pummeling our little corner of New Jersey. The rains had come and stayed for days, complete with kabooms! of thunder and zigzags of lightning that tore through dark skies. Sissy didn't like i t- not one bit. Shaking and shivering with anxiety, she actually let me cuddle her close. She didn't want off my lap or out of my arms. The disappearing covert operative had suddenly become like Velcro!

During a reprieve from the storm, Sissy detached long enough to let me take a shower. Before I flipped on the water, I decided to keep the bathroom door ajar just in case Sissy had the urge to be near again.

When my shower was done and I flipped off the water, a loud rumble of thunder and a bright flash of lightning pierced through the mini-blinds shrouding the bathroom window. I wrung the water from my hair and, as a few droplets of rain pelted the roof, another thunderous quake clapped as if to usher in an after-shock of the storm. In the silence that followed, I heard a tiny splash.

What was that? Did I drop something into the tub, maybe the soap? I looked, but all was clear.

As I ripped open the shower curtain and stepped onto the cold tile floor, something caught my eye-a dark splotch rising up from inside the toilet bowl. I did a double take: two triangular shapes, like dueling dorsal fins from baby sharks, rose from inside the toilet seat.

The pointy ears, wet face and doleful eyes of Sissy emerged.

I gasped. Yikes - what a place to hide!

A pitiable look on the shivering drowned rat telegraphed, Help! Get me outta here!

I quickly reached into the bowl. Drenched, trembling Sissy jumped into my hands as if my fingers were magnets and she were made of iron.

She licked my wrist and looked up at me with a warm, grateful gaze as I wrapped her in a dry towel and drew her close, feeling as though the storm had served to bond us.

When the sun finally broke through the clouds a short while later, Sissy, her hair blow-dryer soft and smelling squeaky clean from her very first bath, went back to normal - her idea of "normal." She scampered away from me and went into seclusion. I didn't see her again for hours.

- Kathleen Gerard

Kathleen Gerard writes across genres. Her work has been short-listed for the Mark Twain House Humor Prize, The Saturday Evening Post "Great American Fiction" Prize, Short Story America and Best New American Voices, all national prizes in literature. Sissy served as the inspiration for the dog-hero of Gerard's latest novel, the thing is. The story deals with serious issues in a lighthearted, comical way and centers on a blocked romance writer, Meredith Mancuso, a young woman who is grieving the death of her fiancé.