Fleas... again

My father died last autumn.

He had fallen from the 2nd floor balcony at our cottage. It overlooks the large kitchen/dining area and leads to the two upstairs bedrooms. When he built the place in the sixties, he never finished the overhead walkway, which means that there was no railing at the far end. As a child, I often wondered why, and stood over the three-foot gap, thinking of jumping down, simultaneously terrified and curious.

My father's cognitive skills were starting to fail. He got up in the middle of the night to take a leak. He hadn't realised that he was at the cottage, not at his house, where the bathroom is to the immediate right of his bedroom.

I wasn't there that night. My brothers told me that they heard a crash and found my dad straining, but otherwise all right. Everyone laughed, including the initiator of the raucus (though his eleven broken ribs made it kinda painful).

He went to the hospital and was required to stay in bed to let everything heal (he had three broken verterbrae in addition to the ribs). Unfortunately, things started going "bad". He caught two dangerous infections and, though he fought them off, he got worse.

We never thought he would die from a simple fall and a few broken ribs (having played football, we all knew the intense pain of the injury, but also that it goes away pretty quickly). One evening, I received a call from my mother. The brothers had gotten together. I should come meet them.

The doctors had told them that my dad's kidneys were failing and that the pain from his injuries was just not going away. My father spent two months suffering, and his time was nigh. We ate, and, holding his fate in our hands, decided that my father was going to die the following day.

...we then drank. Nobody cried. We sometimes laughed. We used drink to overcome our numbness.

I couldn't stay in the room to watch my father die. The two brothers with girlfriends stayed. The two without sat on the floor of a busy hospital hallway in a daze.

Since that day, my mortality has been shrouding me. I, one day, will no longer exist.

==============

Gargy faced his imminent slaughter grimly. I cannot read Romanian, so he explained what had to be done to get rid of Annie's fleas. He was going to sacrifice his existence - a gift from the universe so fragile and so ephemereal - in order to improve the lives of those closest to him.

I got out my battery-operated circular saw and we headed down to the park (we wanted to get his flea-manna blood away from the house). When we got to a secluded place in one far corner, my little gargoyle's big, beautiful brown eyes looked into mine, tears welling, as he scratched his hanging maleness like crazy. He knelt and looked down, presenting the back of his neck to my blade.

As I started the shrieky whirring of my instrument, a raccoon, quite obviously psychotic, demented and slightly unbalanced, frantically ran from over by the football field screaming for me to stop.

He was a faithful reader of these stories. He had Googled the site Gargy referenced and explained that it was a satire. Romanians have this thing for blood sucking and letting, so the article we read was simply that famous Bucharest dark humour. He also recommended a really great flea powder that'll get rid of our bug problem in a couple days.

Well, what a fortunate way out of THAT impasse!

Fleas

When Annie joined us last month, she had obviously been through some pretty rough times. One could see the filthy alleys and clawed battles with desperate tomcats in her natty fur and scarred hinder regions. If Gargy hadn't rescued her, her life would have undoubtedly been cut short. A pathetically lonely existence, with her being willingly pounced on by every male in sight.

(Yes, Annie is THAT kind of a female. Pretty much like every thirty-something chick I know).

My gargoyle nursed her back to health and she is now a normal, happy, self-centered and territorial feline. That she has the gall to refuse certain brands of premium tinned food after spending the first years of her life scarfing down any rotting flesh she could find is profoundly grating, yet Gargy caters to her whims and, of course, as with ANY girl, she grabs the upper hand conferred by an attentive and affectionate dude and leverages it to no end.

Alas, also as with other girls, once she knows she owns the heart of one guy, she loses interest and seeks to seduce those who are utterly disinterested. This is causing friction between me and my little green anthropomorphic blob, because Annie is increasingly less interested in receiving Gargy's care and is constantly purring around ME. Given that the only attention I wish to give her is impalement on a particularly rusty and dull stump of a spike, her efforts are obviously in vain. Yet she persists and Gargy isn't at all happy.

Anyhoo, the new development is that, in addition to her crude presence, Annie brought fleas with her into my home. Now, gargoyles don't have much hair, but that which they do have seems to be a rather ideal breeding ground for hemovore leaping insects (slime makes fleas happy I assume). The bugs had made their way into every corner of my apartment and Gargy was gradually going quite insane from the constant scratching (and dagger-sharp claws scraping scaly skin makes for a REALLY irritating noise resembling the screechy instruments played in Italian soccer stadia when a player does a particularly convincing dive-and-ankle-grab with just the right amount of tears shed).

I had gone through washing or throwing out every inch of fabric in my home and the Cleaning Lady has supplied every ounce of her insect-genocide knowledge. Despite the efforts, the bugs have proven themselves difficult to displace and we were becoming desperate.

After a quick Internet search, Gargy found a Romanian site which explained that gargoyle blood is a flea narcotic and that one should capture and slaughter any medieval beast that has been infected AFTER bringing it into one's dwelling. Once the source of their bliss has been depleted, the fleas would starve themselves to death in a massive withdrawal-induced suicide.

...Gargy wasn't happy at the news.