Annie CXXVII: Shame

So I got Pet to the sink and pulled the little Sylph First Aid kit out of the medicine cabinet.

She shucked all her clothes, sneezing her head off while she did. "I hope pitoo! This will help pitoo! The sneezing Ray pitooOOOsie!"

"I hope so, too," I told her. I washed her off in the sink, glancing towards the door now and then. Well, glancing towards the doorway, or at least the floor of the doorway.

The water seemed to sluice off most of whatever was bothering her airways. I put a dab of shampoo in her hair to get the last of the dust or whatever. She shivered a bit so I wrapped her up in the tiny sylph bath towel.

"Is that better, Pet?"

"Yes, Ray. The sneezing's stopped a pitoo! Well. It's less. Thank you."

Still no sign of Annie. She should be at the door, blaming me for whatever was bothering her new sister. Or co-pet. I wondered for a second how Annie would refer to Pet after the wedding.

"Well, let's see what else is wrong."

Pet showed me her bloody knees and elbows. I lay her back on the spread towel and looked at her through the magnifying glass.

"Impressive," I said. And it was. There were scabs on the joints, but they still seeped blood. Considering the speed of their tiny little metabolisms, our pets rarely bled for long.

So they didn't usually get any disinfectant in the wounds, it'd require us breaking them back open.

"This is going to hurt a little bit," I said. I shook the bottle. She nodded, a somber expression on her face. I daubed the tiniest drop of the red stuff on each bloody wound.

"I normally wouldn't bother," I said, stroking her hip in a soothing manner. "But I don't know what's making you sneeze, and that stuff might be trapped in your blood."

"It's the CTS," Pet said through gritted teeth. She didn't flinch or scream, though. I tried to remember what we had in the house with those initials.

When I was done with the disinfectant, I thought about bandages, but they probably weren't really necessary. And at her joints, they'd make Pet walk like the lead monster in Attack of the Drunken Mummy.

I told her that and she giggled. "We'll just wait for a moment to see if the bleeding stops."

"Pitoo! Okay."

I gathered her up in the towel and carried her into the living room to wait.

"Now, Pet, tell me how you got hurt and why Annie isn't blaming me."

"We were bored," she said. "Annie said you shouldn't have left us home alone. That a loving master would take care of his pets and keep them from being attacked by the bordey-man."

Denise was out of town and my office was busy remodeling. I had ironically feared that the fiberboard dust would be harmful to our pets and left them at home. So the bogey-man of boredom had a clean window, and I no longer had a clear conscience.

"Mea Culpa," I said. "But what happened here?"

"We watched old movies. We got Denny's tapes of old ghost movies and watched one of those. There's this guy and he died, see, and-"

"Pet? I would love to hear the complete plot of both movies, but I want to know how you got hurt."

"Oh." She twisted a bit and stared into space. I was pretty sure she was fast forwarding through the movie plot to the point of wounding. I sat patiently, my eyes scanning for the other pet.

"And we decided we needed some secret passageways in this house!"

"This house I'm going to sell when we move into the new place we're buying?"

"Yes. Annie said it was practice to get it now so we can figure it out then and do it right, you know?"

"Of course." I sat back, holding her close to my chest.

"Well, we knew you didn't want to have us tunnel through the walls or the furniture or the stereo cabinet or the TV or the-"

"What did you tunnel through, Pet?"

"The carpet. It's not tacked down or anything so we lifted the edge and we put a plastic cup in there."

I glanced around and saw a hump in the carpet near the wall. It was an extensive hump, uneven, running along the wall about three feet.

"You can't crawl through the cups of course," Pet continued. "But if you stand them up, the carpet lifts around them and you can go around the cup and there's a space between that cup and the next cup kinda like a tent stretched between two tent poles and you can crawl through there. Annie says when we do it for real in the next place we can just cut the bottoms out of the cups and make it a straightthrough tunnel system."

"Oh, really?" I asked. She nodded. I took a moment to examine her wounds. They had scabbed over, though the disinfectant colored them to look something awful. But they were dry so I pinched her clothes out of my shirt pocket and watched her get dressed.

"The effort that must have taken, Pet..."

"Oh, it was fun. Climbing up to get the cups and throwing them to the floor, and rolling them into the living room. The fun ones were round and rolled straight but the Star Wars ones are... Um. Comical?"

"Conical."

"No, they've got cartoons on them, so I'm pretty sure they're comical."

"Okay," I agreed. She pulled her shirt on and stood to pull up her shorts.

"Anyway, the sides are slanted so they kept rolling in circles."

"That must have been hard."

"Just something to keep track of," she shrugged. "And we got them out here and it took both of us to pick the carpet up, then one held it and the other shoved the cup into place and we crawled out to the edge and put another cup in and then shoved the fourth one in closer to the third one and the third one closer to the second and the second closer to the first and then we picked up the carpet and shoved the first one in farther STILL and crawled back out and that’s where these came from." And she showed me her torn up knees and elbows.

"That just sounds exhausting," I said. "But where does the CTS fit in?"

"Wellllll," Pet said, looking everywhere but up in my face. "Annie said it was just to be expected with what we were doing."

It struck me, then. Annie was hiding, not because Pet was hurt, but because she'd used the little blonde to deliver a pun.

"You suffer from Carpet Tunnel Syndrome, don't you, Pet?"

"Uh huh!" she nodded, a big smile on her face.

Somewhere under the sofa, we heard a raspberry.



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