So, imagine, if you will, this charming domestic scene: Bluechick on the sofa, with her laptop, murmuring softly in delight over Bush’s latest approval ratings. Me, curled up at her side, perusing a cookbook for a cake recipe to simultaneously satisfy my need to get rid of a carton of orange juice and her unequivocal demand for chocolate frosting. Lots of it. Ah, and there’s JellyMutt, laying quietly on the floor (for once) and ardently licking…what the hell is that? Bluechick grasps my face firmly as though to grace it with a passionate kiss, looks me dead in the eyes and orders: “Don’t look.” ‘mkay…
Just call me Pillar O’ Salt, but try as she may to block my view with her slight frame, I can’t help but notice her pick up something long, yes, very, very long, at least a foot and a half, between two fingers. And it’s floppy, too, so very large for - OH NO!! - a lizard!! She’s not talking to JellyMutt, no, nary a scolding syllable coming out of her mouth as she disappears out the sliding glass doors into the night. I retract into a very small ball and bury my face in a pillow, hyperventilating, as she wordlessly comes back and heads for a roll of paper towels. I’m grateful that I don’t have my contact lenses in because it’s easier to forget a fuzzy out-of-focus horror. Still, I am deeply freaked out and whimpering.
She joins me on the sofa, hugs me, and says, ever-so-softly, “Just so you don’t think the worst…it was a rat.” A rat? A RAT!!! As in, a pestilent putrid rodent right here inside our pristine abode? And wait a second, a rat that was clearly 18 inches long??? And DEAD? For who knows how long!!! Ohmyfuckinggod!!! Freaking out now begins in earnest. Clearly, we have not seen freaking out up until this point at all. “But, but…” (she sputters) “I just didn’t want you to think it was something REALLY bad, like a kitten! What did you think it was?”
“A gecko!!” I wail. JellyMutt naturally picks this very moment to come over and pant vigorously in my general direction and oh look! She wants to lick my face, too. I recoil in horror, perching, for all intents and purposes, on the back of the sofa and shriek, “RAT LIPS!!! JellyMutt has Rat Lips!!!” As Bluechick drags the dog by the collar into the kitchen and sets about laboring mightily at shoveling peanut butter into her mouth to what? Make me forget she was just LICKING AN ENORMOUS DEAD RAT!!! I commence to hysterically listing all the things that have Changed Around Here:
The dog can’t sleep in the bedroom anymore 'cause she might lick me while I’m sleeping
That thing where I try to be a good stepmom and take her out to potty in the middle of the dark night so Bluechick doesn’t have to get up? O-VER!!
Can she please do something so the dog stops…breathing?!
Fuck it, call the realtor, we’re moving. And go pack some shit, 'cause it’s a Bed and Breakfast kind of night, baby.
So, just to let you know, our darling JellyMutt is no more. She has morphed into Rat Lips, my mortal nemesis. As you slumber peacefully tonight, perhaps your thoughts will wander to poor little me, stiff-legged, clutching a duvet to my quivering chin, staring wide-eyed and stricken up at the white, white ceiling and listening for…scrabbling.
Why is this a big deal? The dog found a dead thing and played with it. Or she caught and killed it. They do that. In fact, this is the 100th time she’s done it, just the first time you saw her do it.
If you don’t like the fact your dog (all dogs really) do disgusting (to you) stuff, get rid of the dog,. Or lower your disgust threshold.
I’m hoping you were trying to tell a funny story, but the part about you freaking out is more disturbing than funny.
See, I always love it when life’s little situations are handled so well. It’s great that opposites attract! What would you have done if Bluechick was as wimpy as you? But you didn’t have to worry, she handled the dead rat, and you, of course, take care of all the really gruesome stuff, like how to work orange juice into a chocolate frosting.
We have a rather opposite reaction: my roommates and I are thrilled that our kittens have killed two - two! - mice in the house. We had no idea we even had mice until a dead one was dropped in the middle of the living room by a playful kitten. But it’s an old house, so it’s an easy guess that they’d come in when it gets cold even if they weren’t already here.
You have my sympathy, jellyblue. Our big dumb golden retriever managed to find a formerly frozen pork dinner that had somehow fallen out of the freezer on the porch in Louisiana in the summertime, presumably at least a week prior to that, and proceed to eat it all. I came across him standing there with oozing green sludge dripping from his smilingly PROUD face – “Look what I found, Mommy!” – and could barely brave the stench to take the rest of it away from him. And wrap it in three plastic bags before depositing it in the garbage can.
And then, of course, he came into the house and proceeded to barf it all right back up. In TWO places, one downstairs, one upstairs. Just to make sure the stench stuck around for as long as possible, and to give me TWO more opportunities to clean up the foul mess. It took massive quantities of cleansers and carpet cleaning to be able to breathe again.
I’m not sure I’ve ever quite forgiven him for that one.
Not IN houses in California, but they sure get ON them!
We have a kind of a greenhouse-type window over the bathtub in the main bathroom. One sunny summer morning I looked up to see a very dead rat laying on the more-or-less horizontal part of the window. It seemed to have been dropped there - I guess by one of the enormous crows that hang out in the neighborhood. What I don’t know is why they didn’t come back and retrieve him, for pete’s sake.
This was on the second floor waaaaaay up high, well beyond any ladders we had. And even if they did reach, I can just imagine climbing the 3000 or so feet up on the ladder, gingerly scooping Brer Rat into some container while avoiding any contact between rat and anything I didn’t intend to burn at solar temperatures afterwards.
In the day or so before I was able to borrow a really tall ladder (and convice the SO to sufficiently suppress his fear of heights to do the honors), I was quite impressed with the efficiency and variety of insects that reduced friend rat to the most disgusting yak I’ve seen since the last election. I’d say it was bad enough to gag a maggot, but that was quite literally not true.
I can’t wait for the rains to start so that remaining vague outline of rat yuk will be washed away.
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story!
She’s definitely getting a cake after that rescue!