I had cheese, and it is gone. Certain I was that I did not finish my deliciously mouldy wedge of cheese. The delightful little strips of prosciutto, for sure. The small brick of fancy French Brie? But of course!
But hand on my heart and strike me dead for a liar, I would swear when I left the room that not only was there a solid wedge of stinky blue Roquefort awaiting my return, but an elegant sufficiency of tiny baguette rounds on which to spread it.
I rounded up the usual suspects.
The boy was in his festering sinkhole of a room, too invested in some impenetrable online card game to be bothered stuffing his head hole with imported delicacies.
The teengrrl power ranger was shown by the small subdermal tracker I had installed at puberty to be on the far side of the city. Helping the poor and returning lost pets to their owners, she assures me.
My good lady wife, of course, would not feel the need to sneak this or any other cheese; she would simply have her way with it, avowing that Thucydides was right when he wrote of mighty Athens that “the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”
Suspicion then drew close to those most likely of perpetrators. The cats.
Old and wisened but crafty with it, and ever possessed of a fathomless hunger that admits of no satisfaction, even when with terrible yowls and counterfeit outrage they trick a poor fellow into feeding them a second breakfast.
No, they were outside, sleeping off a third breakfast and a second dinner extorted from unsuspecting and witless neighbours.
Surely, though, it could not be the dog…
Could it? No! Heaven forfend!
The poor and infirm hound is even older than said cats. Wracked with aching joints and laid low by weariness of great age she is all but blind and deaf and mostly sleeps the day away until a bowl of geriatric formula is laid direct before her. She is also, it goes without mention, as stalwart and faithful as those feline myrmidons are importunate and heinous.
She would never betray me so.
Her probity, not to mention her frailty, renders her the least likely offender.
Luckily I have advanced video surveillance of the crime scene.
We need only consult the technology to reveal the identity of the cheese thief…
Every dog will have its day. -Queen Elizabeth I.
The betrayal is palpable. A punch to the gut.