Citycat's Prowlings

The Scary Side of the House

This is the second installment of the “Rocking the Suburbs” series, in which Citycat and Peanut do yard work for an entire weekend and battle all sorts of evil and otherworldly creatures commonly referred to as “nature”. The first installment is here.

Ok. So Peanut and I view the backyard, which is seriously frightening looking. I started to lose hope quickly as we tried to plan strategy.

Me: “We should move that extra grill”.

Peanut: “That grill is holding up the fence.”

Me: “…Oh. Um, and the pole over there?”

Peanut: “The fence is somewhat lacking in structural integrity.”

Me: “Hrm. Yeah. Ok, what about the broken swing?”

Peanut: “We can move that to the side of the house.”

Me: “Great! Let’s move it!”

Peanut: “Heh. Have you seen the side of the house?”

Ok, so there we go. In order to clean up the backyard, we had to move the broken furniture to the side of the house, and in order to do that, we had to clean up the side of the house. So we walk over to the side of the house. This did not look good. It looked, in fact, like the perfect incubation area for giant alien-type spiders. Sometimes, I hate it when I am right.

We had been raking and clearing up the area for about an hour or so when Peanut made that noise. You know what noise I am talking about. It is the noise that says, “Oh, shit. I have just discovered something utterly and completely terrifying, yet I am doing everything in my power to keep my shit together and not freak out the other person near me, because that would not be good at ALL”. Y’all? I hate that noise. With a passion. Of course, I instantly freaked out, freezing, holding my rake as a weapon, and demanding, “WHAT. WHAT IS IT? YOU MUST TELL ME OR I WILL KILL YOU WITH THE RAKE.” (I am so, SO not rational under these circumstances). Peanut responded, clearly barely holding it together but doing an admirable job of faking it, that I was fine, just don’t move.

Now, here is the thing. In a circumstance like this, where someone has made that noise, and I know there is a scary/creepy/awful thing in question, and I don’t know exactly what that thing is, but I know that things in general have an ability to fly/jump/skitter, I do not want to be told that I am fine. And I especially don’t want to be told that I am fine if I do not move. I will decide if I am fine. Preferably from a position SEVERAL HUNDRED FEET AWAY from the source of that noise. And I cannot GET several hundred feet away without moving, so this whole conversation was going nowhere fast for me.

“It’s ok.” Peanut said, edging away slowly. “Just wait here and don’t move.” And she disappeared to the front of the house.

She disappeared to… Oh, HELL NO. There was not a snowballs chance in hell that I was “Waiting here” and “not moving”. SHE LEFT ME ALONE WITH THE CREATURE. I think I broke land speed records and possibly the sound barrier leaping past the general area where the Creature was and joining her at the front of the house, which she emerged triumphantly from carrying a large can of bug spray.

She proceeded back to the side of the house, where I heard the sounds of spraying and screaming. I do not know exactly what happened here, because I was clearly not returning to the side of the house any time soon. The Creature could have stolen the bug spray from Peanut and have been spraying her. It could have been beating her to death with a rake, for all I knew. I am maybe not the best person to take with you on a trip to the rainforest, is all I am saying.

Eventually, she came back around, declaring proudly that it was dead. “Do you want to see it?” she asked. Now, clearly, NO, I did NOT want to see it. I wanted to pretend that it didn’t actually exist, so seeing it was contrary to my denial. However, I know a little something about Creatures like this. I know their sneaky, revenge thirsty ways. So I snuck up slowly behind Peanut, to where she was pointing at a foam covered blob. “See?” she said. “It’s dead.”

But I knew better, and I was right. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than it moved. “NO IT’S NOT” I managed to shriek, on my way back to the front of the house. Then Peanut started shrieking, and then, swear to god, she said to me: “Go through the house, on the back deck is the lighter for the grill.” I was halfway back into the house when my brain, thank GOD, kicked in. I was able to process the entire scene somewhat rationally in my head, and it went like this: Pile of wood, dry leaves, almost entire can of flammable bug spray, giant Undead spider, get the... lighter for the grill? I saw where this was going, and it was nowhere good.

I went back near the side of the house and announced to Peanut that she was NOT setting the spider on fire. “Why not?” she asked. “Too Arachnophobia? Having absolutely nothing to say to that, I simply handed her a shovel, which she bravely used to hack the thing to pieces.

Then her neighbor came over to see if she should call the rescue squad, because we apparently sounded like we were being murdered.

The funniest part was that Peanut could barely speak to her neighbor at all, because she was laughing far too hard at me, whom she had never seen move so fast. “You were next to me, and then you were gone.”

I explained to Peanut that she was lucky I had stopped in the front yard, that there was a good chance that I would have simply kept going, and been halfway through DC by the time she noticed I was gone. And then she clearly would have set her house on fire.

Stay tuned for part three: Demon Vine.

posted by Citycat @ 12:46 PM