I’ve never slept much. It’s just never been one of those things that worked for me. Oliver would wake up, refreshed and happy, and he’d push the hair back from my eyes and ask me why I worried about things I couldn’t control or change. Why didn’t I just close my eyes and let them drift away? And my answer always has been and always will be the same. Not seeing those things, the things that haunt you, the things the trouble you, the things that follow you, doesn’t make them not there.
But still, I throw a sheet over it and hope it just kinda…ya know…vanishes. It hasn’t happened yet, but that’s no real reason to give up, is it? Christ, I sound like Hershel….Anyway, maybe it hasn’t moved, and maybe I should take that as a victory? I’m going with yes.
I half expected it to be gone when I got back from work today. It went on the lam once, what’s preventing it from doing so again? But nope, when I got back, it was sitting there by the window, a lumpy My Little Pony Casper with a kitten on it’s lap, and the Huckleberries sniffing hungrily at it.
The Huckleberries very much want to eat Monsterman. They suspect he is delicious.
Liam and I noticed it as soon as we brought him into the apartment. We sat him on the rocking chair by the window, and a curious and-for my money, slightly audacious-Huckleberry, lumbered right over to him, slowly, tentatively took a pointer finger in his mouth, and before I could react, bit it off.
“No! Bad dog. Thing. Dog. Spit it out.”
The Huckleberries understand what I am saying. Of that I am certain. These are intuitive little mother fuckers. Ok, one part of that sentence is inaccurate, can you guess which part? I’ll give you a moment…that’s right, they’re intuitive GIANT mother fuckers.* However, at select times, they pretend that they’re just big, dumb dogs, who sniff each others’ butts and eat garbage, which they certainly do in droves, and really the scent can’t change that much in an hour, but they also understand me. They understand me! Until I tell them to drop the finger they’ve just bitten off. Then they’re all “Woof woof what woof.” They are not fooling anyone.
I bent slightly at the waist and pried the beasts jaws open and stuck my head in, looking for the offending finger.
Liam gasped. “Karen, get your head out of there. These things are huge! He could bite your head right off!”
Liam had of course seen the hellhounds before. They more or less have run of the town, now that they have proven that they are exceedingly friendly and increasingly fat. It’s hard to be too intimidated by what ultimately looks like an over-inflated, furry blimp on four stubby little fire hydrants. However, just to really cement their status as not intimidating, I’ve hot glued hats to their heads. They now look a little something like this:
<–for scaling purposes, please note that that is a normal sized hat. The Huckleberries heads just happen to be anvils covered in fur.
Anyway….
“I’m not worried about him biting me, I’m much more concerned about his halitosis.”
I sometimes have these quick, random bursts of fear of Oliver coming home at the exact inopportune time. They come and go so quickly, and for half a second, with my entire head in one Hucklberry’s mouth, while the others, hats akimbo, wriggled happily around a very nervous priest, who had just helped me deposit a Monsterman, sewn together from various corpses and wigs, with a play-dough nose, a Hawaiian shirt, a pair of Oakleys and a fishing cap, in the rocker next to our window, I thought “how in the world would I explain this?”. It would be a strange place to be dropped in the story of my life. I mean, you sort of figure, basically assume, that any isolated moment in a person’s life, is a point in the plot that is already deep and thick. But at least you’d have a minute to breathe, to figure it out. See what I’m getting at here? Of all people, I think you would…your quiet moments were always so few and far between. I wonder if that is still the case….
But even if it is, it’s not the point. The point is, that the damn dog, the beasty, swallowed the finger whole. And I was furious.
I threw a classic tantrum. I stomped. I balled my fists up and pumped them wildly. I used obscenities that had not existed prior and have been stricken from the record, but that were so full of invective and venom that they rendered every living thing in a ten mile radius sterile, and to them, I apologize. The offending Huckleberry tucked his giant, be-hatted head low beneath his paws, and suffered my outrage pathetically. He showed me his big, fat underbelly, now even fatter for the presence of a finger, and moaned sadly.
Liam, moved by the manipulations of the sneaky son of a bitch, patted it’s exceptional girth and said “Now, now Karen. He didn’t really mean to.”
“Of course he did. What other intention could he possibly have had when he put the finger in his mouth and then bit it off? I do believe his exact meaning was to eat that finger.”
“But he didn’t understand that he shouldn’t.”
I stamped my foot. “Of course he did!”
Liam sighed. “They need to know that he’s not for eating. As it is, he’s just a sandwich on legs to them.”
<–ok, maybe not just like this, but you get the idea…
I sighed. “And how do I dissuade dogs that eat literally everything not to eat this sandwich on legs?”
Liam shrugged. “Maybe if you demonstrated that he doesn’t taste good.”
“I don’t think I like where you’re going with this. Plus, they’ve certainly never seen me eat garbage and say, ‘mmmm, I’d like some more of this.’ Or not say that. Just eat garbage in general.”
“But have they seen you eat garbage and spit it out?”
I’m all game for a round of questions, but this was getting a bit out of hand.
“What do you think?”
“Right. So they don’t have any reason to believe it tastes bad.”
“I am not. Under any circumstances. Eating a part of Monsterman and then spitting it out and saying ‘ew’ to demonstrate how gross it is.”
“No, no, I’m not saying go that far. Maybe just….lick him.’
“YOU lick him!”
“I don’t actually care that much if the dogs eat him.”
“Oh, I thought you were best buddies now!”
“I’ll find another inanimate object to talk to!”
I rubbed my temples. “This is so not helping.”
He shrugged. “I’ll lick it if you do.”
“Priesthood’s really starting to lose it’s sparkle, eh?”
A strange look passed over his face. “I assure you, it would hardly be the weirdest thing that’s happened to me.”
I assessed him carefully, and realized how little I truly knew and continue to know about him. “We’ll come back to that. You go first.”
He leaned in slowly, and stuck his tongue out. Very, very tentatively, he touched the tip to Hiddleface’s Hiddleface-forehead, to be precise. Before he could even react, I did.
“Ugh, Ew, yuck!” Shudder Shudder Shudder Shudder Shudder. You’ll have to fill in that noise, it’s too difficult to spell.
Liam pulled back and rubbed his stomach miserably. “Ew, yuck! What an awful taste! I certainly don’t want to eat any of that!”
He motioned with his head, from me to Monsterman. “Your turn, little lady.”
“Uh-uh. Nope. Will not do it.”
“You’d lie to a man of the cloth?”
“Absolutely I would!”
“Fine, but then if the dogs eat your Monsterman, you’ll have to answer to Hershel.”
“Dammit! One Huckleberry already ate a finger. What makes you think we can change their minds about eating the rest of him?”
“Because we have no better ideas!”
I sighed. “I really hate this.” And I did. I did more performance than actually licking, but my tongue did indeed touch it’s skin, and I’ll never forget that. My reaction was neither exaggerated nor faked.
The Hucks looked confused and approached him tentatively, but pulled back. Then approached again.
“All for nothing. We licked Monsterman for nothing.”
Liam rubbed his chin. “Make the cat pee around it.”
“What?!”
“I bet that will work. They won’t like the smell of cat urine.”
“Why didn’t you think of that before we licked Monsterman?”
He shrugged. “Still might not work?”
So far it has, but I can’t tell if they’re just placating me and lulling me into a false sense of security. Additionally, now all I ever smell is cat piss, so it’s not exactly win win here.
The Huckleberries really want to eat Monsterman.
Maybe I should let them….
*to return, at length, to my little asterisk in the sky….I cannot actually attest to any carnal relations the Hucks have or have not known with their mothers. I stand by the name, though.