The gateway to Hell is through a pet's ass.

6:15 PM

I broach my home, weary from a long drive and a longer day in the office, to an awaiting silence. Sepulchral silence. Cheesy horror movie where the scantily-clad coed is going down to "check on the pilot light" in the dank basement silence. This strikes me as being fairly unusual, as my developmentally delayed cat usually greets me at the door and, drawing his gut into his tiny ribcage for maximum effect, politely reminds me that I have but one duty each lovely evening: providing him with his starvation-rations of kitten chow, delivered via quarter-cup scoop to his awaiting maw.

No kitten to be found.

No whippet to be found.

For one glorious moment I envision a reality where they've managed to simultaneously kill and eat each other, leaving no trace of their existence save their pitiful, still-warm collars on the kitchen floor. I smile inwardly, and perhaps outwardly, as I make my way into the living room.

Now, had this been a made-for-TV slasher flick, one would imagine screaming at me through the glare of your television screen and I, heedless to your advice, carry to fruition my date with destiny.

Today, I was to discover, "destiny" is spelled g i a n t m o u n d o f s t e a m i n g d o g s h e t.

I gazed upon it (them? there had to be, like, nine turds) and felt all of the hairs on my body stand on end, a phenomenon I have heard is associated with the moment before one is corporeally consumed by a thunderbolt. I felt one of the smaller blood vessels in my eye quietly give, momentarily clouding my vision.

Once I had regained some of my composure, I began to assess the scene in an analysis remarkably akin to those one might see on one of those late-night Court TV shows - you know, the ones about how they caught a man who ate dead women's skin.

Composition: fecal extrusions.
How many: nine to twelve; it was dark in there.
Culprit: dog.

Perhaps most sinister was that there was a clearly discernable scatter pattern: not only was the dog walking while performing the necessary but it was clear that the

cat had played with the nuggets

[ ! ]

In a sad kind of way, you had to admire the cat's ennui: in a house full of things for him to play with, he felt the pressing need to frolic about with naturally-processed dogfood nubs. As I frantically searched under the raised furniture for some that could have been batted underneath, dry-heaving the whole time, I managed to glimpse out of the corner of my eye of a patch of brindle.

The culprit. Hiding. A forty-five pound dog trying to hide in a house the size of a Good 'N' Plenty box. Yes: clearly that was going to work.

As I brought him out from his hiding place to bring him outside for his ten minute breath of fresh air for the evening, I carried him to the scene of the crime.

As he beheld his massive shet cairn, a look that might have been guilt flashed through his brown eyes. It was, however, immediately replaced by something darker, something I couldn't recognize immediately. Something more primitive and base, to be sure; in it I heard the high call of the wolf over the permafrosted tundra, sending daggers of anxiety into the marrow of ptarmigans and snowshoe hares and driving those with the cleft hoof into the relative safety of more open ground. Something in that look said "Whaddya gonna do about it, betch? Huh?"

Lock you in fekkin' puppy-jail, that's what, deck.

As my blood pressure returned to a level where I didn't have a white halo in my peripheral vision, I began to feel a measure of disquiet that welled up from within me.

They say that, in the weeks before Mount Vesuvius blew its pumice-filled head off, chickens had refused to lay and were found to be standing completely still on their roosts. Horses reared in their stalls for no apparent reason, dogs were gnawing patches of their own coats off and fishermen were having to travel more than a mile into the Bay of Naples for even the rankest of trash-fish.

Yeah, something like that.

Hey, I thought. What's that smell? And why is it coming from the laundry room, where the cat box is ensconsed?

As I entered he unholy room, I was greeted by - you guessed it! - a shet cairn. A gigantic CAT shet cairn. Balthazar, unwilling to use the nice, new organic dust-free litter I'd taken pains to find, had decided that, surely, the best option would be to

duke all over the paw-mat

Did I mention that I love our pets?

Now, I knew the cat would be harder to find; Satan can, after all, fit on the head of a pin. I concluded that the only way I would be able to draw him out to face his sentencing would be to utilize the only thing he respects: his food. Shaking the bag gingerly, I watched as he emerged, covered in dust and hair, from a cleverly-concealed lair under my bed. I picked him up and brought him to the laundry room, where the coils still held their rank court. I brought him very close to them - close enough for him to smell them - and then carried him to Kedi Hapishanesi (Kitty Jail). He knew he'd been bad. There was no throaty weeping. There was no writing to senators. Hell, he even traded himself for a pack of smokes.

As I cleansed their messes with products that were originally meant to strip rust off the hulls of ships, I had to marvel at their ingenuity. The cat had done it because he wanted his old litter back and because he is evil in the flesh, but the dog had just...thought it was fun? I mean, I stood at 6:45 this morning and watched him take a dump. How was there anything left? Had they coordinated it to amuse themselves? Why me? What have I done to deserve this?

And perhaps most important:

When does that Romany caravan come through town?

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (uptohisarmpitsinmammaleffluvia) Potorti