Squish and Zoomboy had to run stuff out to the garbage.
They came running back in, screaming, “Oh my God! It’s horrible! I’m so scared!”
Real tears– faces scrunched up, hysterical– inconsolable.
Mate and I remained skeptical. “What was it again?” we asked.
“It was a SLUG,” Zoomboy cried. “THIS BIG.” He held his hands out to indicate the slug that ate New York.
“If it’s that big,” Mate muttered to me, “I’m going to donate it to science and have them name it after me!” (This was a little unfair to himself, seeing that I”m the one who has barely moved in three days, thank you tendonitis of the IT band. Urg.)
“Show me,” Mate said, putting on his shoes. “Let’s go see this slug.”
“No! For it will eat us and we may die!” they screamed. (I am paraphrasing here– it was hard to make out real words in all of the hysterical sobbing.)
Finally he talked them out to the trash cans, and a few minutes later they came back in.
“It was a lizard,” he said, baffled. “About this big.” His fingers indicated six inches. “You ran over its back with the trash can. It was dying.”
“Oh! That’s so sad!” Because I like lizards, mostly. They’re sort of the friendliest reptile, at least the smaller ones out here. No poison, no fangs, just an appetite for crawlies. Go lizard go!
“But the… the… THING!” Zoomboy wailed.
“That was it’s TAIL! I know you didn’t mean to–he was probably under the trash can before you pulled it out. But, you know. A lizard!”
“So, not a giant fanged poison slug of the apocalypse?” I clarified. “We are safe?”
“Apparently so.”
Later on tonight, as I sat in my chair, knitting peacefully and watching– finally– the season finale of Sleepy Hallow (for those of you wondering why I haven’t seen the one of SPN yet, you now know where I am in the DVR timeline) Squish looked up quite calmly.
“Oh mother–mother dear,” she said. (And in this case I am exaggerating for contrast. She was remarkably unruffled.)
“Yes?”
“A wee spider just scuttled under your chair.”
I was a bit alarmed. “A small one? Are you sure? Not big and hairy with fangs?”
“No. But it was black. You know, like a spider who might have lost her husband. I thought you ought to know.”
So, given that I am moving too slowly to leap out of the chair and throw it back against the wall in the quest for giant fanged ACTUALLY VENOMOUS SPIDERS, there’s a possible black widow spider wandering around somewhere near my yarn.
And the kids killed a guardian lizard big enough to catch and eat it.
I’m starting to think we really DO deserve giant horned poisoned slugs with fangs. At least Mate and I could have the species named after us.
