Bring Me the Head of Mickey Mouse
Actually, it came to us of its own accord. And thereby hangs a tale of terror, appropriate to the remorseless approach of Halloween.
As recounted in my previous post, When Great Sky Demons Attack!, my Black Sharpie, Emma Dog, is terrified of hot-air balloons. She’s afraid of Round Monster Heads as it is. When they’re great big and fly and roar and breathe fire - well, how would you expect a girl to react?
Even a Tuff Chick like Emma, who is in almost all ways a most valiant defender of Daddy and Pack.
Once, walking along the lateral ditch that runs south of Montaño to the clear ditch, Emma and I encountered a stout, elderly Lab-cross dog running frantically the opposite way. Usually I’m upset by loose dogs; I’m always concerned they might get frisky with Emma, and issues ensue. In this case, no: the poor beast was puffing hard and clearly scared stumbling.
Her owner, a pleasant young lesbian (the haircut, the bulky sweatshirt - just give me this one, okay?) came trotting in hot pursuit. “She’s trying to get home before the Moon comes up,” she explained in passing. “She fears the full Moon. She thinks it’s a hot air balloon.”
At which Emma and I could only shake our heads in amusement. Emma doesn’t fear the Moon, full or not. She knows it’s just an orbiting celestial object. Whereas hot air balloons are Great Sky Demons.
Nonetheless I dared entertain the hope I might wean Emma from this particular phobia (why, I admit, I’m not sure.) Until, that is, a certain afternoon early last winter. Or perhaps the winter before.
Emma was out in the backyard. Suddenly I heard her just totally fly into pieces. This wasn’t just barking; it was nigh hysterics.
I ran out, expecting Charlie to be coming over the wire. Or at the least the back fence. Instead I beheld, floating neither high up nor far off, the familiar inverted-fruit shape of a hot air balloon.
It was loud. It was late enough that its fire-jets lit it up from within. Seeing the huge ears protruding from its sides, I was seized with a sick certainty as - slowly I turned - it rotated in air.
Okay, we know that pretty much every animal larger than a planarian instinctively fears two eyes staring straight from the front of a head, yes? They cry out: danger! Predator! It’s why butterflies have those eye-spots on their wings, in hope that something that’s planning on eating them will, when the butterflies spread the wings, be convinced they’re confronted with a larger predator that might eat them.
And appearing there in the sky above my back fence, a thousand times larger than life, were the hideously staring round eyes and terrible tooth-baring grin of Mickey Mouse.
And as Emma cowered before the awful giant rodent’s severed flying head, my hopes of curing her phobia shattered in pieces. In her canine mind there could remain no possible doubt: hot air balloons really are Great Sky Demons.