pet connection

The mousie corpse was old enough to be stuck to the floor. I have almost no sense of smell so by the time I found the mouse, it was pretty ripe. I thought the smell in my bedroom was cat pee, which put Dickens in a slight pickle, but after washing all the bedding and laundry in there I realized there was a mousie corpse underneath the cedar chest.

I am squeamish to the nth degree. I have had the beginnings of a stress-induced asthma attack just watching someone draw blood from my dog. A reeking, decomposing rodent is not something I handle well. More likely, I run out of the house screeching. This time I ran downstairs quickly and then breathlessly called my go-to neighbor John, who lives across the street. John is far braver than I am, and like the manly man he is, he came over with a long handled hoe.

My dog Ginger worships John. She turns into a total slut around him, and he loves her up enthusiastically. She moons for him. Dodger jumps all over the place to greet John, brings him all kinds of toys. Dodger pulls out all the stops, but he knows that John’s heart belongs to Ginger. Ginger knows this and struts in front of Dodger with a flirty kind of “neener neener neener he loves me” response.

We went upstairs. I was prepped with a plastic bag and kitchen gloves. We closed the dogs in the bathroom to prevent any further unpleasantries like dog-corpse interaction.

“It’s stuck,” I said. “To the floor.”

A quick scoop and the mousie was up. “Get the bag,” he said. I inverted it and prepared to pick up the corpse.

“Not that way,” said Ginger’s man. “It’s not poop! Just open the bag and I’ll drop it in.”

Fine, fine. Inverting the bag was an automatic response. Just call me Pavlov.

“You have to clean the part that stuck to the floor,” he said. Gag.

Mission accomplished. I opened the bathroom and let the dogs out. Dodger was still trying to get John’s undivided attention, which simply isn’t going to happen when Ginger is around. We went downstairs, John with the long-handled hoe, me with the bagged corpse, and Dodger with a pair of my underwear in his mouth.

Dodger was determined to get some attention, come hell or high water. He danced around with my underwear while I thanked John profusely and promised to take him to brunch (I owe him approximately 16 brunches at this point. There are schedule issues.). Dodger loves to be mischievous, but today he had a mission of drawing John’s attention to him, and he took his mission to heart. He ran around the house with my underwear hanging out of his mouth. “Drop it” was not working. I went to pull it from his mouth, at which point he ran away. I ignored him for a bit thinking I’d just get the underwear later.

At the risk of too much information, I’m talking about a pair of briefs here. Hanes or Jockey, I think, six to a pack. Think Granny Panties from “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” I’m not a thong girl.  There was a fair amount of fabric in his mouth.

John was petting Ginger, of course, so Dodger turned into a total brat. Dodger ran back into the room with my underwear still hanging out of his mouth. I leaned over to get it. He ran under the kitchen table. I dropped down and went under the table with him when I realized that there was no underwear hanging out of his mouth. Hmmm. Where did they go, I thought, as he stared at me. They weren’t on the floor. And then, to my horror, I realized where they were. I reached over quickly, opened his mouth, and yanked the undies out of his throat as they were sliding down.

They were totally wet and disgusting, but at least they were snatched from the jaws of death – literally – and were not able to metamorphose into what my veterinarian calls a foreign obstruction.

God help me, I have let my dog grow up to eat underwear, and it’s my own fault. Wonder what he’ll attempt to eat next?