The illusion held, a glorious, ridiculous charade, bringing in enough dough to keep the wolf (or rather, the poorly disguised children) from the door. But fate, that mischievous imp, often has a trick or two up its sleeve.

One evening, during the grand finale, when “the dogs” were performing a synchronized dance that would have made Busby Berkeley weep, Bartholomew's costume, held together by spit and wishful thinking, gave way. The head of the dachshund, revealing not a drooling snout, but the flushed, embarrassed face of a ten-year-old boy.

The music screeched to a halt. The audience gasped. Mrs. Maple dropped her bag of peanuts, scattering them like tiny, accusing eyes across the floor. Clark, his face paler than a Dalmatian in a snowstorm, could only stammer, “Well, folks… that's show business!” And Bartholomew, ever the trouper, simply bowed, revealing the ripped seam in his furry costume. As the crowd recovered from their shock and then erupted in laughter, Clark knew his days of canine caprice were over only to be replaced with something he never thought he would ever experience. Family bonding.

Wendy, a man whose face seemed permanently creased in an expression of knowing amusement, was a local enigma. He possessed, or so he claimed, an uncanny prescience regarding the daily news. Bank robberies before the getaway car even cooled, mayoral scandals before the ink dried on the illicit contracts, celebrity gossip before the celebrities themselves were aware – Wendy knew it all. He spun yarns of sleepless nights, of shadowy observations, painting himself as a nocturnal vigilante, a journalistic ghost. “I've seen things, you wouldn’t believe,” he’d murmur, a glint in his eye that suggested he’d just pulled a particularly juicy secret right out of the cosmos.

The townsfolk were, to put it mildly, bewildered. Some whispered of a deal with the devil, others of a secret government program. Old Mrs. Higgins, who’d once claimed to have seen Elvis buying groceries, suggested Wendy was channeling the news directly from space aliens. The truth, as it usually does, resided in a far less dramatic, yet infinitely more ironic, corner.

Wendy, our self-proclaimed purveyor of truth and justice, harboured a secret as crumpled and unassuming as a yesterday's newspaper. He wasn’t a psychic, nor a superhero, nor a spy. He was, in fact, a humble paperboy.

Yes, while the town slumbered, dreaming of sugar plums or stock options, Wendy was out on his bicycle,slinging news at sleepy doorsteps for a modest sum. He knew the news before it was the news, because he had a stack of it under his arm, hours before it hit the stands.

The metaphor lies in the fact that Wendy was “delivering” the news in more ways than one. He literally delivered it, but, more importantly, he crafted and delivered a persona of knowledge and mystery based on a profession one wouldn't expect to be the source. He transformed the mundane into the extraordinary, the pedestrian into the profound, much like O. Henry himself used to do.

His nightly escapades, rather than involving daring feats of espionage, consisted of battling overzealous dogs and mastering the art of throwing a rolled-up newspaper with pinpoint accuracy. His 'sleepless nights' were fuelled by lukewarm coffee and the burning ambition to finish his route before the sun rose. Yet, from this mundane reality, he spun a web of intrigue, making himself the oracle of their small, gossipy world.

The irony, thick enough to spread on toast, was that Wendy, in his elaborate act, was simply delivering the news in more ways than one. The truth of his “prescience” was hidden in plain sight, obscured by the very news he peddled. After all, who would suspect the paperboy of knowing the secrets of the universe, or at least, of Main Street?