Skeleton in The Closet

Now, picture this: There I was this afternoon, going through one of my storage closets looking for Christmas ribbon. Which isn't a hard thing to find in that closet, since the rolls of red ribbon are in a white box marked "Christmas Ribbon." However, the box was on the top shelf of my closet. All I wanted was one roll, and I didn't need to take down the whole box, right?

So there I was, on a little step-stool, with my hand inside the cover of that box. My fingers found a roll of red-velvet ribbon. Perfect. So I lifted the roll out of the box, not even bothering to look closely at it. As I stepped down from the little stool, my eye caught the ribbon-roll. And you know what? There were two teeny little eyes staring down at me.

Into the air went the roll of red ribbon, along with the two teeny little eyes and whatever kind of body was attached to them. I let out a screech... the stool up-ended... the dog started to bark... and two of my three cats ran into the hallway outside my sitting room. (The third cat -- Rusty -- didn't bother to wake from his nap, which didn't surprise me.)

I sat on the floor (softly carpeted, thank goodness) and looked around. Nothing got knocked over when the roll of ribbon went flying through the air. The step-stool ended up near the door, not touching any of the wood furniture. Gracie and AngelBoy and ShadowBaby sat there in the hallway looking at me as I sat on the floor. Gracie brought me her chew-bone. I guess she thought that as long as I was down there, she may as well see if I wanted to play.

No time for play.... I had to find out who belonged to those two teeny eyes. I found the roll of ribbon across the room, so I started my search there. I didn't find anything on the floor, but I figured that where the ribbon flew, those eyes should've followed-- wouldn't you think? So I kept looking on the floor in that corner of the room.

Meanwhile, my baby cat (ShadowBaby) walked into the room, followed by AngelBoy. True to his spirit of play and love of bright colors, AngelBoy went straight for the ribbon and tried to unroll it. ShadowBaby, however, made his way cautiously towards me and was creeping up towards the pink velvet fainting sofa that's in this room. You know how cats sneak up to something-- body low to the ground, ears back, tail down.... slowly, slowly they go towards the thing that's caught their attention.

Well, I'm no fool. I just followed ShadowBaby's line of vision, and there were the two little eyes: attached to a petrified, brown, stiff body of a once-green lizard. It was reclining very nicely on my pink velvet sofa. Wonderful. Actually, it looked sort of graceful, and it was clearly not alive, judging by its brown color and the skeletal look of the poor thing. I quickly got ShadowBaby out of the room and into the hallway, then picked up both AngelBoy and the red ribbon and put them out in the hallway as well.

Just to be on the safe side, I put my glasses on and looked at that lizard from a distance before going right up to it. I watched it for half a minute or so. Definitely not moving. I took a wooden ruler and tossed it onto the sofa. It landed a couple of inches away from the creature and the lizard was as still and as frozen in time as that ruler.

Only then did I walk up and look more closely. There's no way of knowing how long that lizard was in the closet, and heaven only knows how it got way up there in the first place, but it looked like a fossil from the Stone Age. The black dots of its eyes were protruding from its skull, which looked to be paper-thin. The entire 2 or 3-inch length of its body looked as if it would crumble into dust if I touched it too hard. (As if...)

Now.... how to get that thing off of the pink velvet fabric of that sofa without leaving any of its remains behind? And of course, my husband wasn't home for this emergency, so I was on my own.

No way was I going to touch that thing with my bare hands. Nor could I use something to pick it up because I was sure it would disintegrate and mess up my sofa. So.... I got hold of the box of Kleenex and started to line up some tissues behind the lizard. Three or four was what I thought I needed. Then I got down as close to the skeleton of that lizard as I dared and made believe I was blowing out candles on a birthday cake.

Perfection! The lizard flew back onto the second tissue, without leaving any sort of mark on the pink velvet. I folded it up into all of those tissues. So proud of myself, was I. When I opened the door, AngelBoy was sitting there with half of the red ribbon strewn all over the hallway, and ShadowBaby ran into the room and jumped up on the pink sofa to look for his prize. (Which I brought to the powder room and, giving it a royal flush, sent it on its journey to Galveston Bay.)

My husband will be home from work soon. Of course, I will tell him this story. I know him well, and I know his sense of humor. When I get to the part where I tell him that I had to blow the lizard to make him move, I will bet the farm that he's going to say: "Lucky lizard."