Written in creative nonfiction class

It was the scream of a thirteen-year-old girl: high-pitched, long, panicked but not terrified. And repetitive. A scream. A second scream. Another scream.

“Elsa!” she yelled.

“Eeeeeeeelllllsa! How could you?” she screeched.

“Elsa, get out. You are disgusting!” she commanded.

I was downstairs, grading papers, when the ruckus started. I knew it was nothing serious from her scream. There was no fear or pain in her screeching. Instead, her yelling and hollering only confirmed that I’d better get upstairs because it was sure to be amusing.

L, our only daughter and germophobe extraordinaire, was dancing about, high stepping on her tiptoes as if she were walking through a combination of hot coals and dog feces, and she wasn’t sure which would be worse step on, the coals or the poop.

“Elsa took a bit of poop out of her litter box and began playing with it on my bed!” she wailed when I made it to her side. “It’s everywhere! All over my blanket!” She screamed again. “It’s so disgusting!” I looked down and saw a bit of feces on the floor.

“It’s on the floor, too.”

L began retching, acting as if she were about to double the mess by regurgitating all over everything. (She does this any time she eats something she doesn’t like. She says it’s an involuntary response; I think she’s faking it and exaggerating it.

“I am not cleaning that up!” she declared.

I couldn’t help laughing. Here she was arguing with me about who would clean up the mess created by the animal for which she had positively begged only a few short years ago. “Elsa is my cat!” she has proclaimed on several occasions. “There’s no ‘our’ about it!” This was always in half jest, but when there’s a mess to clean up and the cat is the culprit, it becomes total jest.

“Stop laughing!” she wailed.

Yet there was no way to stop. I was laughing; my wife was laughing; and whenever one of us thought we had it under control, we would look at the other or L would burst into fits of squealing panic again, and we’d begin laughing at once.

She took the blanket off her bed and was heading out onto the upstairs balcony off our master bedroom. Once she stepped outside, she began squealing again.

“There is an enormous grasshopper out here on the deck!”

My wife and I just laughed harder at that.

“It’s not funny!” she protested.

In the end, the soiled blanket ended up on the balcony railing, the grasshopper made it into the house, and the cat ended it all by catching the grasshopper!

“Great! Now she’s going to leave the dead grasshopper on my bed as a gift.”