Suddenly, the box shifted in the backseat, and seemingly began to move on its own.
“Hey! Are we safe? Did we get out?” I heard a parent say. “Can we go back and get my husband? He’s lying at the bottom of an inflatable canoe on aisle three.”
What’s on That Dog’s Butt?
The wood floor of my living room was littered with little, fluffy white things.
I saw it when I woke up and was shuffling to the kitchen to make my morning tea.
I saw a bit of the fluffy mass float through the air and land on the head of my “dog,” Bella, whom my husband and I have come to believe is not a canine at all, but a secret government experiment gone horribly wrong.
Bella looked at me and panted as a larger piece of white fuzz dangled from her lip.
Then I saw it. The sight was chilling. There, near the foot of the couch, lay the carcass of Bella’s “Baby,” once a cute little fleece alligator. I bought Baby for Bella when she was a wee little puppy and still exhibited signs of being a normal dog, hours before she had developed the potential to terrorize what she laughingly calls “her masters.” The shell of Baby was now hollow, gutted like a deer, her hide crumpled and limp, lying tragically on the floor.
“Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!” Bella said to me as her fatal fangs repeatedly bit into the round, plastic bubble that had once been Baby’s squeaky heart.
I screamed in horror and called for my husband. “The dingo ate her Baby!” I yelled. “The dingo ate her Baby!”
My husband jumped out of bed and ran into the living room. “That’s it!” he said when he saw the puffy mess. “Last week she ate my favorite shoe and yesterday she ate two whole packs of Juicy Fruit that I left on the coffee table! It got stuck to the bottom of my shoes and when I was at school that morning, I realized I had dragged a six-foot banner from the Association of Blind Students halfway across campus! Even the Hare Krishnas stopped singing to laugh at me!”
Bella didn’t care that my husband, an innocent college student, was now considered the mysterious, dark-force enemy of the blind.
“Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!” she said.
I was bound and determined to punish her for her bad deed, and I put her outside for the rest of the day.
“That’s it for you!” I said as I shook my finger at her. “Your Baby is dead!! I’m not buying you any more victims!”
As soon as she came in that afternoon, she catapulted herself onto our other, older and nearly mummified dog, Chigger. Once a cheerful, vibrant, happy Labrador, Chigger doubled her body weight once we got Bella and she started eating her way through subsequent depression. She spends the majority of her day hiding beneath the coffee table or under the cushions of the couch, much like prey does, trying to blend in and afraid to make a single move to indicate any sign of life to her predator, Bella.
To make matters worse, I suspected that Chigger wasn’t long for this world, as I had spotted a growth of sorts on her rear end several days before. I thought perhaps she had taken a particularly strained movement, but every time I tried to check it out, she either sat down or her fat shifted over the part I needed to see. I could tell that the tumor was gray and rather oval-shaped, a little bit smaller than an egg, but I needed help lifting her up so I could get a better look.
As Bella tugged on Chigger’s foot, the poor, chunky, graying dog threw once last glance at me for rescue, and then went limp. Before I could even reach her, Bella pounced on Chig’s jelly belly with a forceful hop.
My husband gasped. “She’s trying to make Chigger squeak!” he said.
Suddenly, I remembered the butt tumor and told my husband, but as we tried to get to it, Chigger remained as stationary as the Sphinx, and my husband suggested that the only way to reach her behind was to rent a crane or prop her up with lumber.
Bella went for Chigger’s tummy again.
“EEEEEK!” Chig yelped as the air rushed out of her.
“Don’t we have a live wire or a knife that Bella can play with?” my husband cried.
“She ate our knives,” I said as I picked up my car keys. “I’ll be right back.”
As I stood in front of the fleece doggie toys fifteen minutes later at the pet store, I spotted an alligator and I grabbed it. I tested its life force; it squeaked gleefully. I was paying for the new Baby when I spotted the pink ball, and thought perhaps that was what I needed to run Bella’s batteries down.
The minute I pulled it out of the bag, she knew it was for her. Miraculously, the pink ball caught Chigger’s eye, too, and all three of us headed for the backyard to play catch.
Chigger never had a chance. It was a pitiable sight as she tried to run, resembling a rolling fur and fat wave. Although the look on her face joyfully exclaimed, “I’m RUNNING! I’m RUNNING! I am ALIVE!” she lumberingly covered only about six inches of ground before Bella caught the ball. I had to turn my head to laugh at my poor, old, near-dead dog.
With her false sense of ability and failing eyesight, Chigger convinced herself that a rotting, brown orange that had fallen from our citrus tree last season was indeed the pink ball, and dropped the fetid fruit at my feet to throw again. Give a dying dog with a tumor on her butt a last wish, I said to myself.
Then I had an idea.
As I pretended to throw the orange again, I waited until Chigger hauled her body mass a foot or so, and then I snuck up behind her. While she was carefully sniffing around for the orange, I grabbed her tail with one hand and her butt with the other before she had a chance to sit.
And then I found that tumor.
It was flat, fleshy, and when I pinched it, a part of it came off in my hands, and I thought, Well, what do you know? This part of her is dead already! and I moved in for a better view.
The tumor was puckered where I had pinched it, and it sure was sticky. And pliable.
And rather pleasant-smelling.
I had no choice but to pull the mass of the equivalent of six chewed-up pieces of Juicy Fruit in one, tough yank before Chigger took the opportunity to sit down again.
“EEEEEK!” she yelped.
Red Mice
After I woke up on Saturday morning and was making my usual shuffle to the bathroom, I heard a voice from the living room call, “Don’t go in there. We have a problem.”
It was my husband, sitting in a chair, facing a blank and silent TV screen.
He looked mad.
“What kind of problem?” I asked.
“The kind of problem that forces you to go out into the backyard and dig a hole,” he answered plainly.
My heart dropped to my stomach. This wasn’t good, and as my face flushed in panic, I opened the bathroom door. There was water everywhere.
I took a deep breath. This was bad. In our house, we only have one bathroom, which means if it’s out of order, we’re out of luck.
“I used Drano already,” my husband said as he came over to stand behind me. “It’s just not going down. The toilet won’t flush, and the plunger won’t work.”
“What should we do?” I asked.
My husband sighed. “Either we call a plumber,” he answered, “or we have an alternative option.”
“Such as?” I asked.
He led me to the window that faced the backyard and opened the curtains. Next to Turd Alley, the strip of dirt that my dogs defecate in, is what we tenderly call “The Structure.” Apparently, it had once been a garage that was in use for decades until large pieces of it began falling off and termites munched on what was left. As a result, I believe the only thing keeping it erect is prayer, mostly on the part of my neighbor, whose fence will be flattened a moment after The Structure takes its last breath. The garage door is slightly open and also frozen in place with rust and decay, so access inside is rather difficult, unless you’re an advanced yogi who can twist his body like a pretzel and also possess absolutely no fear of black widow spiders and scorpions. It was directly in front of this slightly ajar door that I saw a large mound of dirt that looked like a
grave.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to it.
“I dug a very deep hole,” my husband answered, somewhat beaming with pride. “It will take us months to fill it up!”
I thought for a moment. “You made us an . . . outhouse?” I questioned, hoping that I had misunderstood. “In The Structure?”
“If it works in the mountains, it can work in the city,” he asserted.
“I’m calling a plumber,” I said, reaching for the phone book. “I’ll be damned if my white heinie ever sees the light of day! The Structure barely has a roof on it!”
So I called the plumber, who told me he could be out in about two hours. In the meantime, my husband jumped ship under the guise of going to work and left me to fend for myself.
I tried to wait for the plumber, but I couldn’t. I hadn’t tinkled since the night before, and my bladder felt as heavy and big as a watermelon. At the last minute, I ran out to The Structure to relieve myself, but despite sucking in my breath and getting my knee all the way to my ear, my time was running out and my bladder was running out of patience. I tried in vain to force the door open further, but it was no use. The flood was coming, and there was nowhere to hide. With only seconds to spare, I hopped into Turd Alley, leaned against an orange tree, unbuttoned, and squatted. My dogs, however, thought this was a game. While the bigger one kept jumping on me, the puppy equated my release with the new trick she had learned, drinking out of the hose, and tried repeatedly to get her fill. As I grabbed hold of her to push her out of the spray, I peed on my own hand, on my shoe, and then stepped into a pile of fresh doody that wasn’t mine. I had already wiped and rebuttoned when I noticed my neighbor, curiously looking out her second-story window down into my yard.
The plumber finally showed up, and I showed him the problem. He seemed to know how to fix it right away, and climbed on the roof to insert a chain into the sewer line.
Then the phone rang, and it was my friend Jamie. I told her about my potty problems, and that Mrs. Parrish had seen me urinating on my dog.
“You know what that sounds like to me,” Jamie said, “that sounds like feminine problems. My plumber had to do the same thing with the chain, and when he pulled it out, there were hundreds of tampons hanging off that thing like ornaments on a Christmas tree.”
I gasped. I had come face-to-face with this plumber; he would know they were mine. This was something I couldn’t blame on my husband.
I hung up the phone and ran outside to where the plumber was perched on the roof.
“Guess what?” I yelled as loud as I could, trying to scream over the sound of the drilling chain. “My husband has a very big problem! He sleepwalks, and once I caught him flushing a whole box of tampons down the toilet! I said, ‘What are you, crazy! You’re not supposed to flush tampons! I never do!’ Isn’t that funny!”
He just looked at me, and I went back into the house.
When the drilling stopped, the plumber came inside and wrote out a report.
“Your sewer line was clogged,” he said. “Probably has a lot to do with tree roots. You’ve got a pine tree right over that pipe.”
“Oh thank God,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Only tree roots.”
“Yeah,” he said, filling out the form. “Sign right here, please. See, the biggest problem with that is that the roots catch all kinds of stuff, and then you get a clog, and then your toilet backs up.”
“Did you find a clog?” I said slowly.
“Found a clump,” he replied. “Big as my head. What you could call a whole colony of red mice.”
“Mice?” I asked. “In the sewer?”
“Red mice,” the plumber said with a grin. “You know. Tampons.”
I just stood there, not able to say anything.
“You really shouldn’t flush them,” the plumber said, handing me the receipt. “Make sure you tell your husband that.”
And then he winked.
The Hands of Death
I didn’t understand it. The pumpkin heads were right there.
They were right there, right where I had put them on the top shelf in the laundry room last year.
Now, they were gone.
And I had a feeling I knew who was responsible.
“Honey!” I yelled to my husband, who was very busy trying to figure out the instructions for the new stereo he had just bought. “Have you seen my pumpkin heads?”
If anything in my house is missing, mutilated, or downright killed below knee level, I know the culprit is Bella, our dwarf Wookie with a severe case of separation anxiety, who appeared to be a dog at the pound, from whence she was then passed on to us.
However, if anything is missing from above knee level, there’s only one person who knows about it, and is hiding the details because he’s too afraid to tell his wife.
I feared that the pumpkin heads had met the fate of the Man Hands, the same instruments of destruction that turn an entire load of white clothes the same Strawberry Quik shade of pink; the same ten fingers that believe in each of their ten hearts that they can successfully make ice, yet flagrantly return the ice trays to the freezer with a quarter of an inch of water in each of the wells; the same appendages that, last January, headed out into the front yard clutching a hedge clipper to assist them in cutting the Christmas lights down; and, oh yes, the very same agents of Satan that knocked off an antique light sconce with a hand-blown glass shade, which then shattered upon impact with the floor in a record twenty-four seconds after I put it up. “Now that cannot be my fault,” the Man Hands said, looking at the glass shards on the floor. “I had no idea it was there and was just walking down the hallway.”
“Why were you touching the walls, then?” I callously asked. “Why do the Man Hands feel the need to touch the walls? Keep the Man Hands in your pockets. They are not butterflies, they are not balloons, they are not cute little birds that flutter about. Those hands are the Apocalypse!”
My husband does not have the Midas touch. Unfortunately, he was blessed with the gentle caress of Godzilla, which really only surfaces when he comes into contact with anything that’s mine. In any case, I feared that the pumpkin heads had met their fate at the same moment the Man Hands came to lie upon them; although I hoped I was wrong, I knew in my suspicious heart that it was true.
I needed the pumpkin heads, and had intended to use them as my centerpiece ever since I kind of committed to decorating the house after a neighbor commented on the sad, dead state of our lawn several weeks ago.
“If it wasn’t for the severed sections of Christmas lights still hanging there, people would think your house was vacant,” my neighbor said as he unrolled a length of silver tape to prevent birds from flocking on his winter lawn. I had to admit that it was kind of true, since I had completely given up on our yard after I got a water bill for $150 in July and had never seen our grass take on anything beyond a sickly lime hue.
“Oh, we’re getting ready for Halloween,” I quickly said. “We decided last Halloween to hand out candy as Herman and Lily Munster this year, and wanted the experience to be very authentic. Look at the cobwebs on my porch! It’s taken every bit of will I had not to brush them away this whole, entire year! And the dead rosebushes, a tragedy, but a sacrifice I was willing to make. It’s all for the kids, you know.”
“You don’t have kids,” he replied.
“We know people who do,” I stammered.
So in the effort to make good on my lie, I hit the stores in search of the perfect decorations to turn our neglected, trashy home into a haunted one. I bought orange lights to replace the cut-up Christmas ones, a big fake spider to go with my already cultured-cobweb porch, and a five-foot-tall skeleton with eyes that light up.
I rushed home with my purchases, anxious to set up my display on the front porch, and that’s when I discovered the missing pumpkin heads.
“Where are the pumpkin heads?” I asked my husband as he shuffled into the laundry room. “I put them right up here!”
/> His head hung low, and he shrugged. “I’ll buy you new ones,” he offered.
“Like the Christmas lights?” I said. “So, you’ve killed again. What happened this time?”
“They attacked me,” he said, flailing around the Man Hands for effect.
“The pumpkin heads attacked you,” I repeated, trying to stay calm.
“YES!” he answered, and began to reenact the scenario right before my very eyes.
“I was outside,” he continued as he opened the laundry room door and stood on the other side of it. “And it was really hot, it was July, and I had just taken the trash out. I was coming back inside and—”
He swung the door into the laundry room, and suddenly the door stopped, as if it was blocked by something big and invisible. “And suddenly, the door wouldn’t open any farther, and I realized that there was something trapped in between the door and the dryer.”
I just stood, looking at him.
“It was the pumpkin heads,” he explained, as if I didn’t get it. “They must have fallen off of the shelf and just got lodged there.”
I kept looking at him.
“It was hot outside,” he said again. “It was really hot.”
“So you bludgeoned the pumpkin heads with the door to get back inside?” I asked.
“YES!” he affirmed. “The smiling head was cracked in three pieces, so I threw them away.”
“Them?” I asked.
“They were attached,” he said. “Weren’t they?”
“Idiot,” I said as I walked out of the laundry room, through the dining room, and almost to the bedroom before I heard the sound of a crash, the signal that Man Hands had killed yet again.
The Slattern’s Blue Panties
It was lying at the bottom of the dryer, curled up, all nice and snugly, like it belonged there.