Creepy Kid

Our Daughter was only a little thing at the time, maybe two years old at most.

I had picked her up from daycare and brought her home to start the evening routine of bath and dinner before My Lovely Wife returned from her long day at work. Picking her up out of our four-door sedan, I balanced Our Daughter in the crook of one arm and grabbed her dirty daycare clothes with my right hand. Our Dalmation, Pepper, barked happily in the backyard.

"Pepper," Our Daughter said in a sing-song voice.

"Is that Pepper? Do you hear Pepper?" I asked.

"Pepper," she said. "Pepper, Pepper, Pepper, Pepper, Pepper..."

As dusk turned slowly to night, the interior of our small home was cast in shadows not thick enough to leave one groping for the walls but just enough to obscure details in hazy darkness. I passed through the garage, through the kitchen, and into the center of the house where I could unload the dirty clothes in the laundry closet without switching on any lights for fear of losing my grip on the little girl who continued to sing the name of her much adored dog as we advanced.

"Pepper, Pepper, Pepper, Pepper, Pepper," she chimed.

Somewhere in the kitchen, as the ambient light diminished, Our Daughter's soft tones began to morph into something cartoonishly frog-like. A croakiness crept into her throat and her voice dropped an octave. She continued to repeat "Pepper, Pepper, Pepper." By the time we reached the dark, windowless hallway that housed our laundry closet, she no longer sounded anything like my sweet little girl. It sounded instead as if I were carrying a thing possessed, a demon child maniacally calling out for its pet hellhound.

Many thoughts went through my head at that moment -- like how much does an exorcism cost and who do you call to book one. The hair on the back of my neck stood stick straight out over my collar, a tingling sense of panic crept up my spine, and I half expected to see Our Daughter levitate out of my arms with her eyes glowing red. All the while she continued to croak for her dog, "Pepper, Pepper, Pepper..."

I did the only thing any rational adult would do under the circumstances. I dropped the laundry on the floor where I stood, walked through the house turning on every light I could find, and brought Our Daughter into the kitchen to feed her dinner. Thankfully, whatever demon had temporarily possessed her vanished under the glare of the bright lights. That, or demons don't like rice cereal mixed with pureed apples.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

The Place Where Wild McNuggets Grow

Our first dog was a Dalmatian, which is kind of like owning a sixty-pound, beatifully decorated, maniacally affectionate garbage disposal on four legs.

Pepper, as we called her, never met an object she wouldn't introduce to her digestive system. A wicker bed, bark from a plum tree, asbestos shingles off our first house, broken Coke bottles, five-dollar bills from my dresser... You name it, that dog ate it.

One day she ate an entire tube of A&D ointment, a vitamin-fortified vaseline. Why somebody found it necessary to develop and market vitamin-fortified vaseline is beyond my comprehension. We had a tube of it to apply to Our Daughter's nether regions during diaper changes, because we were told that's what parents do. Pepper snuck into the room and downed the contents, container and all, resulting in several days of suffering through an excessively greasy coat and extreme sphinctal clenching.

Our second dog, a poodle named Lily, is much less daring in her adventures. There have been a few blips on the radar. Chewed window blind cords, a few strands of carpet pile when she was a puppy, and a candy bowl raid one holiday season are the only blemishes to an otherwise squeaky clean record. Unlike her predecessor, if Lily heads for something she shouldn't eat, she actually obeys if you tell her to stop, which is why her behavior the other night came as such a surprise.

It happened so quickly, I didn't even realize she had found anything in the grass while we took one last stroll before bedtime. We were barely outside long enough for her to squeeze out an ounce of poodle piddle, so I don't know how she managed to track down this particular object and carry it back into the house on the sly, all the while avoiding the urge to wolf it down.

Just inside the door, Our Daughter looked oddly at the dog and asked "What is Lily eating?"

"Nothing," I said.

Yet when I checked the dog's mouth there it was, clenched between teeth locked tightly down like a steel trap on a wild animal: a McDonald's chicken McNugget.

With fingers pinching the protruding poultry, my brain retraced our steps. All we did was cross the street, she peed in the grass, and we walked straight back to the house. How could this dog -- the same dog that takes no notice of squirrels and rabbits darting across the road not ten feet in front of her, the same dog you have to forcibly lead to kitchen scraps that have fallen to the floor -- how could she possibly have managed to root out an errant McNugget like a crazed pig foraging for truffles?

"Drop it," I told her in that deep, trailing, serious tone we all adopt when instructing domesticated animals and children to stop doing whatever it is they shouldn't be doing.

All I got was a sneering sidelong glance from a poodle ready for a fried nuggety game of tug-of-war, but I wasn't letting go. She eventually relinquished her prize and followed me hopefully to the trash can where she spent the remainder of the evening mourning the loss of her splendid catch.

Ever since, even though I tried to make it up to her the following day with a few pieces of chicken Marsala, I still find her lingering when we pass that spot across the street where wild McNuggets grow.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler