They didn’t think they would have to worry about wild animals living in the city, but she woke up in the middle of the night to a loud crunching noise – a serious crunching!
She was about to take the broom to the cat. She turned on the light and both she and the culprit froze in their tracks. The beastie looked kind of like a combination of a cat and a rat, but in her sleepy state, she couldn’t put a name to the cute grey terrified creature that was showing its teeth to her now.
“What is it?” She called for Jack.
He came running out naked in a sleepy haze. He took the broom from her. “I’m not exactly dressed for this,” he said taking a warrior’s stance with the broom. He eyed the teeth of the creature and his dangling manhood so vulnerable in close proximity. Even he was stymied, “What is it?”
They had thought the noise was coming from one of their cats,”Big Boy,” who was a serious eater weighing in at eighteen pounds, but the cats were hiding. This wasn’t a cat.
Jack chased it around the kitchen while Kristie watched with amusement from behind a glass door between the kitchen and the living room. He chased it slowly and easily talking low and soft until he was able to coax it outside through the open kitchen window. When it did finally exit, Jack slammed the window shut, locked it, and gave the all clear.
“That was weird. What was it?”
“It was an opossum.”
That should have been warning enough, but they didn’t take heed and continued leaving the kitchen window open to accommodate the coming and going of their three cats. They didn’t think about it again and left town for the weekend to go visit some friends at the beach.
When they got back, they headed up the stairs and picked up the three newspapers that had accumulated there, and opened the dead bolt at the front door. As they progressed through the house, they noticed things missing here and there. The stereo was gone along with all the liquor kept on the kitchen counter, and the marijuana plants Jack was growing in the locked closet. The closet door had been torn off with a crow bar.
The cops came over, looked around, and wrote up a report. They surmised that the thieves had noticed the newspapers on the stairs, the open window at the back of the house, and the crow bar Jack had left at the back door while he was fixing something. Opportunity knocked. The thieves had a party.
“Keep your doors and windows locked, pick up your papers everyday, and don’t leave tools laying about as an invitation… and you might consider getting a dog.”
The cops knew that their pot plants had been taken too. They could tell by the dirt rings left on the floor where the plants had stood. But this was Berkeley; they didn’t care. Kristie got a dog the next day.
(First published 2/13/12)
