The Pusher

Some people are so sweet and innocent looking that you just never realize the sort of mischief they will get you into. Mrs. Carter, who had taught culinary arts at our school for 20-some years, is a sunshiny individual, ready with a kind word and a cheerful smile for everyone she meets. Her students love her, as much for her encouragement as for the fact that if mischief makers flip her switch to the dark side, she will put them in their place so firmly they tread funny for a month.

Debbie and I would talk occasionally in passing, but we really got to be friends when we had lunch together one semester. If you've read any of my other writing, you've probably picked up on my irreverence and the lack of filter that my brain often has. Suffice it to say, Debbie Carter is one of those friends who would laugh just the proper amount when I'd go off-color--a giggle to say she'd gotten and appreciated the joke along with a raised eyebrow to tell me to curb it back in since I was approaching that line and about to vault over it with my usual lack of grace. On the occasions that she dished it out, she'd leave me rolling with laughter with her perfectly placed one-liners.

She became one of the teachers that I'd run to when I had something that I was dying to say back to a student but just couldn't because it trampled that professional line a little too much. I'm pretty sure that there were many days when she would see my eyes sparkling with that look and she'd start thinking of escape routes, but she was always there for me, both with laughter and indignation when needed against the often frustrating elements of our profession as teachers. Our lunch that year was one I remember as overall hilarity, just waiting to see what our little group was going to come up with each day. About halfway through that semester, Debbie inadvertently gave us fodder for a solid month of teasing.

Up until I had my wisdom teeth removed at 33, I rarely had headaches. When I would get one, I turned into a whiny baby, and because they were so rare, I never kept meds with me. Typically if I had an ache, I'd run to Barbie next door and she would pull out the ibuprofen.

On this particular day, Barbie was out of anything resembling pain relief. I stuck my head in every classroom and hit up the bookkeeper in our building, but nobody had any ibuprofen or acetaminophen, my two typical go-to meds. After every single teacher, including Debbie, had turned me down, I returned to face the second half of the day by turning out my classroom lights and letting my students watch a video that was loosely connected to something I would eventually teach, promising not to make them do the accompanying worksheet if they just didn't make any noise at all. I only had to finish that class and third period since fourth was my planning.

Most of the way through second period, Debbie tapped me on the shoulder and I raised my bleary eyes from where I cradled my head and shielded my eyes from the light of the screen.

"I didn't find any ibuprofen," she dashed my quickly raised hopes, "but I did find some of my daughter's Excedrin migraine if you'd like some."

I'd never taken Excedrin before, both because of the fact that I so rarely had headaches and because ibuprofen always just took care of me, but I was at a point of desperation and would have taken just about anything anyone would give me. Going home had crossed my mind, but the pain was so intense that I was frightened to drive.

"Oh, please," I gulped and thanked her profusely. We walked back to her office since we weren't inclined to pop even over-the-counter pills in front of students and she shook two out of a bottle into her hand.

"Do I need two?" I queried. I didn't know the standard dose and usually didn't need as many pills because not taking them often meant they always worked well for me. The bottle she was pouring them from was a general pill bottle that many women carry in their purses, containing extras of her prescriptions and various OTC stuff, including several of the Excedrins.

"I assume so," Debbie replied in her sweet voice, her brow furrowed in concern at how awful I must have looked. "My daughter always takes two."

I thanked her again and ran to the water fountain to wash them down just before the bell for class change rang. Third period shuffled in and asked about the lights. I offered them the same deal as second, and since my usual persona is overly bubbly and somewhat hyperactive, seeing me so quiet and squinty made my kids very agreeable. The light of my monitor as I took attendance shot knives right through my brain, and I put my hands on my temples as I rested my elbows on my desk to maintain an illusion that I was still watching what was going on in my class while the video started playing.

When my head dropped between my hands, I jerked upright. The pain in my head was quite muffled, but so was the world around me. Everything with a light had a soft glow and I felt like I was swimming through the air. I looked at my hands because they felt like they were vibrating slightly and while I didn't actually see color trails, I felt like if I could just get the right angle, colors would become visible. I petted my own arms, feeling how soft my skin was as my classroom wavered in front of me.

A couple of my students scooted closer to my desk as they watched me looking so closely at the pores on my hands.

"Mrs. Williams? Are you okay?" one of them asked.

"I'm fine," I said and giggled at the way my words echoed inside my head. "Do I look fine?" I asked.

"How's your head?" another one inquired.

"It doesn't really hurt any more," I answered as I struggled to lift my face up to look them in the eye. It felt like the air was molasses and when I finally raised my head up, I think it wobbled. Then I tried to wobble it and my eyes went wide with the ensuing vertigo.

"Woah!" I exclaimed. "I'm dizzy!"

The kids frowned and several others were taking note of my behavior to the point that I heard whispers about calling the nurse, but I told them I'd be alright and that I was just going to put my head down on my hands again for a little. Somehow, I managed to stay awake until lunch time, mostly by pinching my leg and smacking myself gently.

I teetered into the lounge after the halls cleared and put my lunch in the microwave. I rested my face on book pile on a desk while I waited. I awoke to Barbie gently shaking me.

"Are you okay?" she echoed my students.

I couldn't have actually been asleep for long because we eat lunch together, but the speed with which I went under was new to me.

"I don't think so," I said. "I'm not sure why, but I can't stay awake."

"Just go to sleep then," Barbie said. "I'll wake you up when lunch is over and maybe the nap will help."

I thanked her and added another book to the pile to keep from getting a crick in my neck. When she woke me up about 30 minutes later, I stood up and went to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face. Some stretches helped to get my blood flowing a little and I thought maybe I was better.

Back at my desk, I tackled a stack of papers only to find my head drooping down and my lids weighted beyond my power to open them.

With Herculean effort, I forced my way down the hall to Rhonda, our bookkeeper, to tell her where they could find me if they needed me. Plus, I wanted someone to be aware that I was in this horrible state. I legitimately thought that the headache was the first symptom in whatever hideous bug had attacked me and was knocking me out now.

"Hey, Rhonda," I began while she looked up and started to rise as soon as she saw me falling like a drunk against the doorway. "I don't, like, ever do this, but I'm going to go into the lounge and sleep. I don't know what's wrong, but I can't stay awake and I surely can't drive home right now."

I'm pretty sure that my eyes were closed while I was talking to her because I remember being startled when she somehow transported to right in front of me. She leaned close into my space and looked closely at my eyes.

"Oh my goodness!" she exclaimed. "What happened?"

"I'm not sure," I replied. "I had a horrible headache and now I'm too sleepy to function."

With her close look at me, she apparently saw that my pupils were dilated. "What did you take?" she asked.

"Huh?" My brain stumbled through the thoughts. "Just some Excedrin Debbie gave me."

"Are you sure it was Excedrin?" she said.

"Well, that's what she said it was. I'll double-check," I added as I headed for that comfy book pile.

I did plan to double-check with Debbie, but I sat down after making it all the way down that interminable hallway. Debbie woke me up a while later when she came in to gather her things to go home.

"Emily? What are you doing?"

My cheek stuck to the top book with a little drool as I tried to focus on her.

"I'm sleeping. I don't feel good," I managed to get out. "What were those pills again?" I remembered to ask.

"My daughter's Excedrin," she said, "for her migraines."

"Well, I don't think they work the same for me," I slurred. "Maybe I should have just taken one?"

I laid my face back down on the pile and told her I was going to sleep again until my children got off the bus so I could drive them home. I recall her frown as I drifted back out.

With the state I was in, I have no idea how much time passed before Debbie woke me up again.

"Emily, I called my daughter," she said with a distraught expression. "Those were Excedrin PM, not Excedrin migraine. Also, my daughter only ever takes one. She usually just takes a half pill or she's too sleepy the next morning."

My impression of an owl was quite excellent she assured me later, what with my wide, blinking, disbelieving eyes. She and Barbie teamed up to get me and my kids home that evening since I was not going to be in any condition to drive for several hours. I had a lovely afternoon of napping in my recliner while my kids enjoyed PB&J and lots of TV. Once I got them put to bed, I had the best night's sleep I'd had in years.

I was back to my usual hilarious self in the morning and I waited until she'd started teaching her advanced class with my yearbook editors in it before I struck. With a smile, I walked in her room.

"Good morning, Mrs. Carter." I grinned.

Her eyebrows took on that familiar wrinkle, knowing that something was coming, but I could see the humor lurking in her eyes, too.

"Good morning, Mrs. Williams," she replied. "I'm glad you're back to yourself this morning."

One of my editors hollered from the back of the room. "What was wrong with you yesterday, anyway? I've never seen you like that."

I threw a smile in her direction before saying, "I don't want to get into it right now, but let me warn you guys that you should never, ever take any medicine if Mrs. Carter offers it to you. Ever."

Debbie sputtered as I laughed hysterically and ran out to a chorus of confused "What's she talking about?" echoing behind me.

During the class change, Debbie marched into my classroom. She didn't speak, but grabbed some thumbtacks on my bulletin board, stabbed something up there, and walked back out. As my kids filed in, they stopped in shock as I collapsed against the wall, holding my gut and cackling with laughter.

Next to a note that said, "I will never share with you again!" was a coupon for Advil.

The Fragment

When I was 14, I spent long weeks conditioning for the upcoming softball season. From running until I puked to a seven-minute mile and some serious weights on my squats, I was in the best shape in my life. Tryouts were in a week and I was ready.

On one rare occasion, I had to ride the activity bus home after conditioning; both my parents were teachers, so there was always one of them still in town doing something, but on this highly unusual day, they had gone home and wanted to pick me up from the activity bus stop. Of course, this was the one day that I ended up running late in getting changed back to street clothes in the locker room, and when one of my friends hollered at me that the buses were ready to pull out, I tackled the gym stairs while still pulling on my jacket and hefting my book bag on my shoulder.

My distracted, klutzy self missed a step on the second to last step of the second landing and I took a long fall. The crack of my ankle when I landed was pretty sickening.

I ended up, of course, in the ER getting an X-ray and when the doc put it up on the light board in the room with us, his eyebrows furrowed as he looked at a strangely shaped object in the center of my foot.

My dad noticed his frown and decided to quiz him. "You know what that is, don't you?"

Our family doctor, who had treated every illness since I was two, shook his head.

"That's the bullet fragment," Daddy shared.

The doc's eyebrows lifted in comprehension. "Right," he said. "I didn't think it would still be there."

When I was six, I shot myself in the foot.

I had been raised around guns and shooting. My dad was an avid hunter and about half the meat on our table came from wild game. From the time I was old enough to aim and squeeze the trigger, I'd been target shooting with my father and some of my best memories from four and five years old are going squirrel hunting with him to help him listen for the squirrels cutting nuts in the trees.

On the day after Thanksgiving during my first grade year, my mom washed up dishes from dinner while my dad took me and my two-year-old brother out for some target shooting with his .22 revolver.

I was so excited for this session because my dad had finally decided I was big enough to cock the gun myself. Previously, I would aim it and pull the trigger while he held the stock, but he was letting me hold the stock, cock the gun, aim, and pull the trigger this time. It took years for me to realize that he was still supporting the weight of the gun with his finger underneath the barrel.

I felt like such a big girl as I positioned the gun. Daddy had talked me through cocking it, using that finger on the barrel for balance, and I had one eye closed, slowly moving the gun so that the little metal line at the front centered perfectly between the notch. My concentration was absolute and my finger tightened marginally as I prepared to squeeze the trigger, having been instructed by my father a million times not to jerk it.

I remember the sound of the shot as it rang out and I remember my confusion at hearing it because I hadn't pulled the trigger.

While I was aiming, my little brother had started around my kneeling father, coming around the arm on which the finger balancing the gun rested. When my dad saw him out of the corner of his eye, he automatically shot his arm out to knock him out of the line of fire. I simply dropped the gun.

Unfortunately, I caught it by the trigger.

Have you ever had your foot go to sleep and you didn't realize it? When you put it down, it was completely numb until the ants started crawling and then you started jumping up and down and smacking your foot until full feeling came back, right? Take that full-on ants crawling sensation and multiply it by 100. That's what it felt like when I shot my foot.

My father frantically searched the ground for the hole. I could feel his rising panic as those ants started marching up my foot.

"Daddy?!" I cried just as the blood started staining the awful brown penny-loafers that my mom loved and I hated.

His response was instantaneous; he scooped me up, pinching the top and the bottom of the hole that was starting to pump blood pretty fiercely as he started to bellow for my mom.

I've never been a huge believer in psychic ability, though I'll allow that there are too many unexplained phenomenon for me to deny that there's some things I'll never be able to explain. The fact that my mother had already grabbed the keys, locked up the house, and was on her way to the car as soon as she heard the report of the gun falls into that category for me. Before my dad and I had even realized what had happened, my mom had one of those magic mother moments--she just knew.

We jumped in the car and tore up the road. Back in the 80's, we didn't have 911 in our middle-of-nowhere home. To get to the main roads was an eight-minute drive, at one point crossing a one-lane bridge to get through Fairystone Park.

I don't remember too much about the ride, but I still have the occasional nightmare about driving through Fairystone. At the very end of the bridge, we got behind a dark green truck. The man driving the truck had ice blue eyes, a large black beard, longish black hair that was topped by a ball cap. For some reason, this man would not let my father pass. Daddy had his emergency blinkers on and honked his horn. He tried to pass on the left as soon as the road opened straight, but the man crossed the double-line to prevent him from passing. The other driver braked hard, actually slowing down and swerving to stay in front of him. Both my mother and father experienced road rage, my dad in particular swearing vociferously and promising legal action against the man while I bled slowly around my mom's pinching fingers.

Aside from being extremely grumpy that my mom was hurting me by squeezing so tightly, I don't remember having strong emotions like fear. Because I was the collected one and we were behind him for so long, I took a few seconds to memorize his license plate since my dad said that he wanted to call the police on him. We passed him as soon as we got on route 57.

We dropped my brother off at my great-aunt's house, roaring into her driveway like the Dukes of Hazzard, and Daddy sprinted up with my freaked out bro in his arms to pound until they opened the door. He was back in seconds and we ripped our way back onto the highway.

They were waiting when we pulled into the emergency room after the quickest trip into town I can recall because my great-aunt had called the hospital to tell them we were coming so they could prepare. The orderly who took me from my mother's arms was a giant black man, and I remember thinking that being enfolded in his arm's felt like sinking into pillows made of marshmallows. He was such a kind man, reassuring me as he hefted me onto the waiting gurney where they rushed me to be examined.

I don't remember much about any of the time in the hospital. I do remember talking to the police, answering their questions about how I was shot since they had been called as soon as the gunshot wound was reported. My dad felt so much guilt that I think he almost hoped there would be legal consequences, but it was just a tragic accident that could have been so much worse.

I do remember the look on my parents' faces as Daddy gave his statement about the man who wouldn't let us pass when I jumped in to give the deputy the make and model of the truck along with the license plate and detailed physical description. Their faces weren't quite as awesome as the deputy's face, though.

The doctors told me that if the bullet had been less than a millimeter to the left, it would have shattered the main bone of my foot instead of barely chipping it. I would have never walked without a limp, they predicted. As it is, I have an uncanny ability to predict when it will snow because the tiny fragment that's there wiggles just a little when the pressure changes.

The only real negative side effect is that I always have to warn the technicians not to rub over it when I get a pedicure. The silver lining there is that so far I've only kicked one technician in the face from reflex when they hit the fragment.

The Assumption

Stereotypes are not often true but sometimes they are. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church and for those who don't even know that stereotype, I'll share a joke to bring clarity.

How many Baptists should you bring on a fishing trip? At least two or the one will drink all your beer.

My aunts on my mother's side fit many of those stereotypes; they believe they know what is right and holy and get great enjoyment out of judging all those sinners around them with sympathetic words and a gentle "Bless their heart." Even as a young child, I made their eyebrows raise with my challenging attitude and determination to find my own way.

As an adult with kids of my own, I've enjoyed a subtle harassment of my beliefs and practices though it pretty much makes me laugh at this stage of the game. They don't bother most of the time now and just assume that my kids and I are going to do and say weird and inappropriate things with regularity though I try to respect how my mom wants me to be perceived.

At Christmas this year, my 13 year old son got a new gaming computer and the only monitor in my parents' house that we could hook it up to was my dad's 15 year old machine that he keeps in his bedroom just for decoration. After we have our small gathering in the morning at my folks' house, the extended family descends and we pack about 40 bodies in the house. The cleaning begins the minute the last present is unwrapped.

I'd barely had time to help the kids get their new gifts set up for play before my mom's older sister arrived to help with the cooking and table setups. My daughter was upstairs hidden in the study on her new laptop and my son was contentedly exploring the versatility of his system and ignoring the entrances and exits into my parents' room as everyone dumped their coats on the bed. I was running around as my mom's gopher, trying to help her avoid walking and setting off her arthritic foot.

The ingress of family continued and my generation showed up, bringing kids from ages 2-18. They all meandered or screamed upstairs, depending on their stage of kid-cool, while we adults congregated in the kitchen setting out the food. In short order, it was time for the blessing and eating.

As the line thinned, I realized that my boy wasn't among the crowd, so I went to fetch him. By this point, he'd been playing on his computer for over an hour and every single person who had come to celebrate had walked in the room to deposit coats.

I stepped past my uncle in the doorway and took a couple of steps when my son moved his head and I saw his screen.

I froze. I stared. I questioned, "Are those people NAKED?"

His head whipped around with alacrity.

"They're fuzzed out!" he immediately began his defense. While he was talking, the character turned towards the front and sure enough, his crotch was a pile of pixilation.

"See?!" He pointed and exclaimed as though vindicated.

I spluttered. "But they're NAKED. Why are they naked?"

I've already mentioned how I challenge the traditional roles in which I was raised. I haven't given specifics, but even I don't consider naked video characters acceptable gaming for a 13 year old in a house of elementary-aged kids, pixilation or not.

Looking for support, I turned to my uncle, who was still standing in the door and starting to crack up as he saw my face.

"Did you see that he was playing that?" I asked incredulously. His daughter is only five.

"Sure I did;" he replied, with a sideways glance and an awkward grin that indicated boys will be boys.

My red-faced son was quickly heading towards me to try to escort me out of the room. He did not, however, have the presence of mind to turn off the game first. When he reached me and took my elbow, I, who was still goggling stupefied at my uncle, turned to him and spotted a not very pixelated naked butt on the screen.

"What game IS that?" I asked, pointing at the screen I still couldn't believe I was seeing. On Christmas. With my uber-religious, judgy relatives there. And their little children. On Christmas.

"It's called Rust," he explained. "I played it at a friend's before and they had clothes."

My eyebrows rose with skepticism.

"Really!" he sputtered. "This is the beta version and they got rid of the clothes."

"It's really fun," he mumbled at the floor as the blush crept up his neck.

As he began to pull me to try to make me leave the room, I whacked him in the back of the head. "Go turn that off!"

The idiot looked at me and said, "But I haven't saved yet!"

I threw up both hands and exited to my plate at the table. When I sat down, my cousin's husband asked if I was alright.

"No, not really," I muttered. I looked up at him. "I just caught Wyeth on a game with naked people!"

He shrugged at me. "Yeah, I saw that."

"What?" I shrieked. "Why didn't you tell me?"

He shrugged again. "I just figured you let him play it."

I was still speechless and staring when my son came in the dining room.

"It's okay, Mom," he said reassuringly. "I saved."

My silver lining was that I've finally trained them to not be surprised at anything me and mine do. Funny that I always thought that would be a good thing.

The Poo

She woke me up at 12:50 the first time. The dog, that is. I had stayed up a little later than normal watching a TV show and it felt like I had just dropped into sleep. She was whining loudly enough for me to hear her over the wondrous white noise app I installed on my iPhone that keeps me blissfully unaware of all but the loudest of sounds from my children and pets. They have to really want me to wake me up.

Apparently, the dog really wanted me.

I accepted that there must be a problem out of the ordinary because she usually sleeps through the night. Once I stumbled through the kitchen and found the leash from the strange place my son had dropped it, I opened her crate and took her outside so she could sit and look at me pleadingly.

Two nights ago, after she'd been in her outdoor lot for all but two hours, she woke me up at three wanting outside. I let her out and watched her sprint into the distance. I gave her a few minutes to go to the bathroom and then whistled her back. She came with alacrity, charging full speed towards me in the door. To say I was surprised gives a new definition to understatement. It normally takes several calls before she decides to hear me calling, so I was pleased to be able to get back in bed so quickly.

Of course, she was only teasing. At the last possible second, she altered her trajectory so that she whizzed by me at a speed high enough for my nightgown to ripple. At the very edge of the porch light, she screeched to a halt and gave me a mischievous doggy grin before heading into the pitch blackness of the front yard.

I whistled and yelled again, and then I heard the charge of claws coming my way. I prepared to grab her collar this trip by, but with puppy laughter, she raced by at the perfect distance for me to just feel the fur of her back. Damn dog. We kept this "game" up for at least fifteen minutes until I caved and got the treats. Right in the door she came when I shook the bag, and I got another three hours of sleep once my temper chilled.

Hence the leash last night. I was not playing rocket dog another night. If she had to go, she could go while on the leash. It was her retractable leash, so she'd even be able to burn a little energy jerking my shoulder socket.

But no. She just sat beside me and gave me a pitiful look.

"Go pee," I told her. I got a lick on the hand and whine in response.

I moved a few more feet out into the wet grass. "Pee!" I commanded forcefully. She took a few steps out, turned around, sat at my feet, and hit me with another pitiful look.

The other dogs came up. The happy-to-see-you-here nose sniffing and licking commenced, and when I told her to go pee a third time, the two outdoor dogs looked at her as though waiting for her to get on with her business so they could go back to bed too. She hid behind my legs and wouldn't budge.

At this point, it was on o'clock in the morning and I was tired, so I took her inside and she willingly went back to her bed and laid down. I shut the door and breathed deeply when my head hit the pillow.

Ten minutes later, she whined again.

My response was a bellowed, "SHUT UP!" and she did.

Fifteen minutes later, I hear a whine followed by my daughter's dulcet call: "Mama, I think Vivie had an accident."

Grumbling and thinking havoc and mayhem, I took the four steps from my bed to the door when it hit me.

Up to that point, the worst smell ever was caused by my husband's digestive system really not liking the barium cocktail required before his CT scan and resulted in my husband and I riding with our heads hanging out the window during a sleet storm in below freezing weather while driving to a friend's house.

The smell assaulting my hallway was at least that bad. With an oath, I flipped on my daughter's light and saw the dog, head hung low and a miserable expression on her face, sitting on the top corner of her doggy bed, as far from the string of diarrhea as she could get.

With a more serious oath, I opened her cage and she made good time tracking the diarrhea down my hall in little, wet, brownish paw prints. That's when I really started cursing. The first time anyway.

I let her outside and decided that I didn't care if she ever came back in. Since I was in the kitchen anyway, I opened the cabinet under the sink to get out my cleaner. My Mr. Clean wasn't there.

My housekeeper usually brings her own supplies, but I figured it was possible that she had moved mine somewhere else. I looked next underneath the bathroom sink. Nothing. Not even extra shampoo. I was more than a little pissed off now, both at the dog and at the housekeeper, since I know that I had a bottle of some sort of cleaning solution somewhere, but furious at 1 a.m. is still stupid tired at 1 a.m.. I headed into the basement where I might find anything. She doesn't normally go down there, but occasionally she leaves a note about doing some laundry so I thought it possible that she might have left my cleaner there. It wasn't.

I finally found a little bottle of an old cleaner supplement that smelled strongly if not good, and decided it was the best I had. Then I turned to look for my mop bucket. I still haven't found it.

I went upstairs, grumbling to myself, grabbed the mop, and ran a bathtub full of suds. After a few swishes to be sure it was wet, I lifted the mop from the water with my hand on that little lever that squeezes the two sides together and gets out the excess water. The sponge wasn't there. The glue had simply turned loose and the sponge fell right off that little plastic bit that holds it to the mop. I stared at in stupefaction for a minute or two and then my brilliance shined right through.

I plunged my hand into the scalding hot water, grabbed the scalding hot sponge, and pushed it back on to the plastic thing as though the nonexistent glue would suddenly hold it there. When it fell off again, I just stared at it dumbly while flapping my scalded hand in the air.

I'll admit to a few tears at this point. I'll also admit that I really don't function well in the middle of the night. Most people wouldn't still have the sleep-time fog after the stench and the burn. I had wised up some and woken up mostly. Just not enough.

I tried again with my unburned hand.

Eventually, I got the paper towels and a bottle of window cleaner and cleaned up the majority of the semi-solid matter with those, shoving everything in a plastic grocery bag. I only had to stand up a few times from gagging at the smell, and the dry heaves only took a few minutes once. I'm very proud that I didn't tow up. The smell when I walked in the room was nothing compared to bending over enough to get it up with paper towels.

And bending over was nothing compared to kneeling on the rug and feeling a squish underneath my knee. That dog got distance with this shit. There was at least a foot and a half of clearance between the cage and the rug.

As I am a forced-positive person (I'm a natural-born pessimist who refuses to let myself stay that way), I turned my poop covered knee into a good thing by realizing I would never have looked under the little dresser stacker for stray poop if my knee hadn't gotten gooed. I would have searched for the smell for days, missing the stream that somehow made it under there. (See how good I am at silver linings?)

About 30 minutes and one roll of paper towels later, I tied off the grocery bag to hold in the stench and shoved it to the bottom of the biggest trashcan I owned. Then I went back into the bathroom for the mop head. It only took eight trips to scrub my daughter's floor by hand with the mop head.

In only ten more minutes from finishing a deep scrub of the floors, walls, and furniture, I had scoured every inch of my arms and legs, glad for the scalding since germs couldn't live through it and even if they did, they would be sloughed off with the top layer of my skin. I changed my nightgown, gulped several glasses of water, checked to make sure my daughter was sleeping well in the recliner since her room was unlivable with stench still, and went to turn off her light.

That was when I brushed off some poop that had gotten on the door jamb from my mad dash with the crate bottom out the door. Another tub of suds and serious scrubbing of every door jamb I passed through whether I saw poop or not, I finally scrubbed up again and wet to bed.

I couldn't sleep because I could still smell it. I would turn my head to the side and catch a whiff. Each whiff resulted in me sniffing another body part for fear that I had missed some on my skin. I did both elbows first, then tried to smell my hair, and when I realized that I had folded double trying to sniff my own stomach, I called paranoia and decided that if it was me and not just lingering odor, it was going to wait until morning.

It took only thirty minutes of talking to myself to convince my brain to believe me.

I have, of course, bought a new mop head, some Mr. Clean, another mop bucket, several sponges, rubber gloves, and a spray bottle of some sort of degreaser since last night. I have taken the cage and everything that might possibly have been touched by the explosion out of my daughter's room and scrubbed every nook and cranny again. Only one element for my peace of mind remains:

Where do I hide my Mr. Clean?