Horace stumbled into the living room, the handle of an old Hickory knife protruding at an angle from his cranium. A jar of petroleum jelly dropped from his hand, hitting the carpet with a thud, rocking back and forth a few times before coming to rest. His swim fins and ballerina dress were in dreadful disarray, though the rivulets of blood coursing down his forehead were a nice match with his fingernail polish.
"Pa!," Horace cried. "Pa!"
Pa was passed out. He'd been mixing cleaning fluids all day, and had happened upon a particularly potent brew that had done the trick. Now his eyes were rolled back and gazing at the minute and lovely little lightning storms that were dancing across the surface of his brain. An entrancing display of misfiring neurons, but better than TV, which was mostly reruns.
He awoke with a start. Upon observing Horace's predicament, he emitted a scream, stifling it before it was fully born. The exertion caused him to fart precisely in the key of "A." (that is, four-hundred and forty-odd cycles-per-second.)
The dog had Pa's wig on the carpet, where she had been industriously chewing the fleas out of it as Pa slept. Pa repossessed his rug, and flung it in the general direction of his own head, where it landed like a broken-legged crab cast up on some desolate shore. He coughed in the key of C# a couple of times, started to spit, but thought better of it. One eye was focused on Horace, while the other studied the small corpse of a mouse which had washed up against the opposite wall during recent housekeeping chores with the garden hose.
"God-freakin'-damn, boy!" Pa said. "What the hell you gone and done now?" Horace attempted to form some kind of acceptable response to this question, struggling heroically due to a badly mangled upper lip. The dog watched the exchange between the two men with worried eyes.
"Ah, uh," Horace said. "Ah, ob - blurzscht."
"I don't talk no freakin' Chinee, boy!" Pa said. "Speak up!" He frowned at the dog, who was trying to scratch an itch with her missing leg, lost due to an unfortunate encounter with cousin Hector's riding mower two summers ago. She got around okay for the most part.
"Shee-it," Pa declared, as he rose from the sofa. "I'll fix yer a god-danged sanditch, just hold on a minute."
Pa pulled the knife out of Horace's head, in order to prepare the meal, for it was the only one in the house. A great gushing spurt of blood followed the blade. Horace collapsed in close proximity to the corpse of the mouse. Pa made the sandwich with care as moths batted at the bare kitchen light bulb, mistaking it for daylight.
The dog shifted her soulful eyes from the rapidly cooling body of Horace to the pale, dirty light of the kitchen, and back again. And again.
Then she readied her phantom paw to scratch another itch.
