Just a little piece of trash

There it was.  Just lying there.  Mocking me.
This seemingly innocent piece of trash represented so much that was wrong with my life these last few years:  just lying there waiting for me to clean it up. 

It showed up yesterday, less than an hour after I vacuumed and cleaned all the floors.  I hate cleaning but I hate dirt more.  Of course it isn't just MY dirt.  As a matter of fact, I'm pretty certain I can only lay claim to a small percentage of that damn daily dirt since I share my house with two teenagers, my husband, a cat and a dog.  However, I hate nagging most of all-  it never works and I manage to annoy myself more than them.  They just look at me with a certain bemused, somewhat patronizing expression, as if the very idea that I am not put on this earth to keep their environment clean is just silly. 

Which leads me to this unclaimed piece of trash, mocking my cleaning efforts and driving home the unwanted job description of Cleaner Upper Of All Trash Which Is Apparently Invisible To All Other Family Members.
Its a candy wrapper, this seemingly innocuous piece of crinkly plastic.  Its literally right in the middle of what is easily the most travelled path in our house-  the path from the family room to the kitchen.  This little blue and brown scrunched up square is still slightly sticky which may account for the fact that although it has been walked on and over multiple times since yesterday, it has stubbornly held its ground. 

No one else acknowledged this piece of trash with one brief exception-  I saw it try to hitch a ride on my 14 year old daughter's foot, the sticky part finally perfectly positioned for escape from its prison on the floor.  Her reaction was to immediately unstick the trash from her foot with a look of great disgust and let it fall right back to the floor, less than an inch from where it had first appeared.

I didn't say a word but I decided right there that it was time to conduct a little experiment.  What would happen if I never picked up the piece of trash?  How long would it be there before someone else would come to the realization that trash doesn't actually throw itself out, that someone actually needs to physically pick it up and give it a ride to trash purgatory-  where it would presumably lay useless and unwanted for eons. 

I had low expectations, figured the trash would become a fixture on the floor for years to come, but there was no way of knowing the strange turn of events that this little piece of trash would be responsible for.


                                                                    ONE WEEK LATER
                                                               
A week has passed. A mere week.  The little piece of trash is still there but I am now all alone.  Strange story, that.

  Apparently, our cat Fluffy (not particularly original except that our cat is hairless) finally deigned to investigate the candy wrapper.  She probably realized that there was still something sweet and sugary left on it, in spite of the invasion of tiny ants, a few of which still inhabited several nooks and crannies ( I had gotten to know those tiny ants well during my many hours of observation of the little piece of trash).  It seems that she must have started chewing on it and it somehow got stuck in her throat.  We aren't exactly sure what happened next because I only found the bodies afterwards but from what we can put together, Fluffy managed to vomit up the offending trash with the exception of a small piece that broke off and stuck in her throat.  An autopsy later showed that she aspirated the tiny piece of perilous plastic and died.

Tiny, our St. Bernard dog, was apparently attracted to the commotion, must have thought that a vomit covered candy wrapper would make a tasty snack, didn't realize that a large fly had already landed on the now valuable piece of trashy real estate and much to both the fly and Tiny's surprise, the fly found itself in Tiny's mouth along with the vomit covered candy wrapper and several diminutive ants.
Now Tiny is as fearless as you would expect a 150 lbs St. Bernard to be with the exception of one thing-  bugs.  Tiny has a true phobia of creatures that are something like 1/gazillionth his size and so it seems that that Tiny, upon discovering the fly and several miniscule ants in his mouth, had what amounted to a canine nervous breakdown.  He managed to spit out the candy wrapper, now covered in cat vomit, dog spit, a soggy traumatized fly and several drowned tiny ants and oddly still only inches from where it had first appeared. Something snapped in that poor doggie brain and from what we can piece together, he went utterly beserk, ran into the large entertainment unit which housed the XBOX my 16 year old was playing which somehow led to the extremely heavy piece of furniture falling on my son who may not have understood in the several seconds he had left that the controller was ineffective against hundreds of pounds of wood. 

It appears that my daughter came running in, slipped on the cat vomit, dog spit, soggy fly and drowned ant covered little piece of trash, hit her head on the granite countertop and died instantly. 
About an hour later, my husband came home to the tangle of bodies and apparently suffered a massive heart attack after coming across the horrific scene.  His head landed an inch from the little piece of trash, his eyes remaining open, staring endlessly at the former candy wrapper turned murderous obliterator of my family.

Throughout all of this, the little piece of trash never ended up more than 2 inches from where it originally appeared.  I guess next time I have a piece of candy, I should be more careful where I throw the wrapper.