Time To Throw Away the Carpet

While I typed on the computer, Chris was sitting on the couch watching football with Paco and Stanley buried under a blanket on his lap.

Mina trotted over and looked at me.

“You want to come up?” I asked her. She didn’t decline, so I picked her up and put her on my lap. Soon, however, she began to squirm, so I put her back on the ground. I assumed she had joined Chris on the couch.

A few minutes later, Chris said, “Ugh!! One of the dogs is farting!”

This is a relatively common occurrence, so I let what he’d said pass without comment.

But then Chris said, “I can still smell it! Who’s farting? Is it you, Stanley?”

This was odd. Chris’s nose is much worse than mine, and often he cannot smell odors that I complain about.

I finished what I was doing on the computer and started walking over to Chris to get my book. Then I saw it.

Squarely in the middle of the carpet, about a foot away from the edge of Chris’s chair, was a giant pile of dog poo.

“ARGH!” I screamed. “Someone pooped on the carpet! Didn’t you see it?”

“No!” Chris said. “I was sitting here the whole time and I can’t see the carpet from here. And none of the dogs have moved from my lap.”

I knew what that meant. Slowly, I turned my head until I saw her — Daddy’s precious little girl, the baby we’d just been doting on a short fifteen minutes ago, commenting on how well-behaved and cute she was — there she was, Miss de Mina, sitting on her puff ball and carefully looking away from my gaze.

“BEAN!” I yelled. “You bad girl!”

She steadfastly ignored me.

“I thought she was on your lap,” Chris cried.

“No, she wanted to get down.”

“I guess we know why.”

“Open the window,” I directed Chris, while I ran for toilet paper. I scooped up the poo, flushed it, and came back with carpet cleaner.

“Oh, OH, OH!” I screamed, as the poo fumes hit me, even as I furiously sprayed the carpet. “It stinks! How does she have so much poo in her? It’s ENORMOUS.”

“She must have been saving it,” Chris said grimly. “They don’t like to go outside when it rains.”

I finished spraying the carpet, and opened the door to the garage. “Let’s go outside,” I commanded the dogs.

I picked up Mina and Paco and deposited both of them outside. When I ran back to drive Stanley outside, Mina walked into the garage without doing anything outside.

I carried her out again. “Hurry up,” I exhorted them.

The boys were confused. One minute they’d been comfortably sleeping on Chris’s lap, and the next they were being accused of vile farts and getting tossed outside in the cold. Oh well, since they were there, they might as well use the facilities.

“Both boys peed,” I reported to Chris when we came back inside. “Mina did nothing.”

Inside, the poo smell was still strong, despite the cold air coming in from the window.

“I think we have to get rid of the carpet,” I said to Chris, holding my nose.

“All right,” he said. “Let me change first.”

While he changed his clothes, I moved everything off the carpet and to the side of the room. The dog stairs that led to the couch, the coffee table in the middle of the carpet, the water dish. By now, Mina knew she had done something wrong.

Chris and I rolled up the carpet and put it in the garage to wait until trash day. When we came back into the family room, Mina was sitting quietly on her dog stairs to nowhere, perched on the top step. She seemed to be hoping that if she just waited long enough, she’d be able to climb to another, better place; a place where she’d be allowed to make enormous poos and immediately disown them.

Twenty minutes later, the poo smell began to clear, but the memory still lingered.

“I can’t believe,” Chris said, “that Mina let out that huge, stinking, slimy poo. It was ENORMOUS! It had incredible linger! Can you still smell it?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well, can you close the window when you get up? Mina’s still shaking. I think she was traumatized by the poo.”

Posted by: ssjane | November 12, 2006 | 4:20 pm
Posted in: Dogs