notes from orlando

My Chihuahua Fred is without a doubt, an authentic canine rock star. My cousin Corinne, however, has a cat named Baloo who is the feline equivalent of a Jet Li-like ninja. So the Malone household celebrity animal death match was pretty much a wash before it even started. The whole thing took all of about four seconds.

According to the police reports Baloo entered stealthily from the dining room, while we all stood in the foyer kissing our hellos. One moment Fred is standing on hind legs, offering his patented two-legged cha-cha of a greeting and the next he's bowled over and yelping a scream that seemed to hold all the pain of every Chihuahua ever born. (He can be a bit dramatic at times.) Cat and dog were quickly separated by their respective owners and though the hierarchy of the food chain had been turned on its head, and except for the fact that Baloo continued to stalk and terrorize Fred to the point of stopping his bowels for the entire four days we were there, no harm was done.

I tell this story to explain how accomplished a hunter Baloo is and to illustrate that while his attempts to hunt and kill my dog were misguided, that he was just doing his part to protect the family from anything that should enter the house below knee level. It's his job and he knows it. Corinne has unusually high expectations for her pets, and Baloo -- cruel and sadistic tyrant that he is -- fits the bill. Her previous cat Bailey, was so amazingly stellar she named her youngest son after him. And at six-years-old, the Boy Bailey, still struggles daily to live up to the accomplishments of his feline predecessor. Seriously.

So you can imagine her disappointment in Sushi the fish who has never done much more than swim around his bowl in lazy entitlement, frivolously taking up Corinne's precious counter space. As you can also well imagine, when she found Sushi lying movelessly on the bottom of his bowl a few weeks ago, she was less than saddened. In fact, she was absolutely thrilled! Had him ladled out, the bowl dumped, cleaned and stored away practically before the last bubble of his fish-breath broke the surface. Then she put on a brave, stoic face and called her children, Cody 11, Kendall 10 and Bailey into the kitchen to break the news.

Apparently, however, the kids were less taken with Sushi than she'd thought, because the first question out of Cody's mouth was, "Can we flush him?"

(Corinne assures me that they aren't hard-hearted kids, that they were in fact, most upset when her own grandfather died last year and they'd never even met him.)

So, the commodal funeral ensued. They all traipsed into the newly renovated bathroom, Cody carrying the ladle, Kendall carrying her little New Testament Bible (because as she pointed out, there should always be a Bible at funerals, even if the funeral is for a fish) and Bailey and Corinne brought up the rear.

They stood around the toilet and Cody very solemnly poured out the ladle.

Bailey wanted to do the flushing honors. And Corinne let him. Though if she had known what she was soon to find out, she might have stepped in to prevent the catastrophe that was about to take place on her son's psyche.

Because when Bailey flushed the toilet -- the slow flush toilet -- the slow swirling action acted as a gentle heart massage for the poor fishy and he WOKE UP -- can we get a Thank you, Jesus! -- an aquatic Lazarus swimming strongly about the bowl. According to Corinne, all they had time for was a quick, "OH! Oops!" and then a very small, "Bye, Sushi," and he was gone. . . pulled into the dark abyss of the septic system.

A certain stunned silence followed the episode as my cousin and her children stared open-mouthed at the slowly re-filling toilet. And then Kendall looked at Bailey and quite seriously said, "You flushed him alive."

"I did not!" Bailey protested, looking to his mother for comfort.

"Well, you didn't do it on purpose," Corinne said, failing to comfort him.

"But look," she said, taking him back into the kitchen, "just look, at all this GORGEOUS counter space!"