COLUMN: We're Interrogating the Suspects

By Tobin Barnes
It happened a week or so ago, over Halloween weekend, actually.

We were visited by…by…well, some would call it evil.

If I were superstitious, I might consider the two related, but I’m not, so I’m going to use the rational approach to figure this out.

Here’s the current situation:

The house is chaotic, totally without its normal order and symmetry. Yes, it’s uncharacteristically a mess. Things are topsy-turvy. This should be here but it’s over there, and that should be…wait, I forgot where that was before. Anyway, nothing is where it belongs.

Added to that, our psyches have been stretched to the breaking point. We’re sleepless, irritable, and tense.

I keep on hearing this high-pitched plaintive sound, begging for something other than what it’s getting. It goes like this: Yip, yip, yip, hoooowl. But sometimes it’s like this: Yip, yip, yip, and then there’s a peeeeee.

All this echoes through my mind like some demonic harpy infesting my sanity, even when nothing’s happening.

All in all, it’s like some demented scene from Poe.

So what’s the cause of all this domestic madness?

That’s right. You’ve already guessed it.

We got a puppy.

“But why?” you ask, having suffered yourself.

All I can say is…I don’t know.

It was sudden, see, like a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Ka-pow!

Yeah. We were just looking, and all of a sudden the trigger was pulled…I’d like to think unintentionally, accidentally maybe. But, yes, the damage was certainly self-inflicted.

Heck, all we were doing was checking out a pet ad in the paper. Next thing you know we’re driving sixty miles to see a puppy, and then the next thing, well…you know. It was cute.

And now we’re suffering severe gunshot trauma.

Ouch! It hurts.

I think…no, let me start over; we weren’t thinking at all. We were hoping (that’s much more accurate) that this dog would be as easy as our other one that died of old age back in April.

Good old Matty. What a sweetheart! Never—from the very first day—did she give us a lick of trouble, literally or figuratively.

Except for maybe those times…. Nah, those have become vague blips on the consciousness radar.

Uh huh, Matty was always an absolute angel, anyway she was from our skewed, nostalgic, still-mourning point of view.

But those salad days are now long gone, even though we had planned on doing everything right with the new puppy—everything by the book…several of them.

Same breed? Check.

Same gender? Check.

Same age? Check.

Same result? Surprise!

The dog gods must have conspired against us. We had had it too good for too long with the first dog. And, maybe, we hadn’t appreciated her pleasant disposition as much as we should have, like making a daily offering of gratitude—perhaps a daily devotional of, “We are not worthy!”

Something like that might have appeased them.

After all, the dog gods are fickle. Evidently they decided it was payback time. Yes, time to make a substantial deposit in the karma pain bank of restitution.