Opossums will STILL kill you.

I'm still rattled by tonight's events. Mitch, recipient of K9 Advantix (There ain't no bugs on him?), spent about 30 minutes in the back yard tonight, just doing general dog stuff: smelling stuff, peeing on stuff, barking at the occasional passersby. In the hot and muggy summer months, Mitch doesn't usually stay outside for that long, and I thought it curious that he hadn't been barking to come inside. I also found it odd that he was in a part of the yard where he never seems to spend much time. Hmph.

When he came inside the house he started shaking his head like crazy and scratching, and when I took a close look at him, I could see fleas crawling across his face and all over the fronts of his little dog arms. Naturally, Mitch wasn't a fan of the fleas, so I spent the next hour of my life like a monkey, picking fleas off of the dog and squeezing them to death. I probably picked about 40-50 fleas off of him. And during that time I was racking my brain, trying to figure out how Mitch, who was wearing pretty powerful flea medication (so powerful that it gave me a rash last week), could suddenly have this many fleas on him.

I immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario, that Mitch had contracted some rare form of rabies that rendered flea medicine ineffective, and that he was going to bite me and give me the rabies and then Matt would get home and it'd be like that awful scene from the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

And then Matt got home, and I had a more reasonable thought, that perhaps there was some weird concentration of fleas in the yard, in the odd spot where Mitch had been spending so much time. I made Matt go with me to the yard, and I used the light from my phone to illuminate parts that were too dark.

I made out something cordlike that didn't look like the rest of the grass.

And then I saw it, there it was, a dead decomposing baby opossum!

And I screamed like mad and threw my arms in the air and ran back to the house, wriggling my body to rid myself of the grossness.

That was about an hour ago, and I can't stop thinking about it and I can't stop scratching myself all over.