Reptilicide

Omigosh. Ok. I need to chill. But. I am deeply disturbed.

I was just vacuuming the 4 lbs. of cat hair from the edges of my kitchen. Piper was perched on top of the fridge watching. Megs was watching from my bed. Jess was nowhere to be found, but i'm guessing he was somewhere under the couch. The cats were curious because they have seen me vacuum the kitchen before maybe, oh, twice in the past 5 years. But I digress.

Anyway, I'm going along, sucking up giant fur-balls and getting extreme satisfaction that can only come from the klinking the vacuum makes as it digests pellets of catfood, litter, and all the gross klinky things on my floor. Ok, if this were someone else's house, I would not walk barefoot. But I'm trying to FIX it, I swear!

So I'm busily sucking up random things, and I swirl around and suck up this --- WHAT? What WAS that? I think. I'm not sure, but I think. No, I fear. That it was a baby lizard. The little clear ones. It happened so fast, my head is spinning. I snapped the vacuum off, but i'm afraid to look in the plastic dirt-holding-thingy. I'm afraid because I don't know what I will see. Will I see a live lizard suffocating in cat fur and litter? Or will I see a dying lizard, mangled and suffering from being sucked through a 4-foot hose and through a HEPA filter? Suffering that I caused?? Or. What if the lizard is LODGED in the HEPA filter. I just cannot deal with it. I can't. And dammit, I drank wine last night, so i'm not doing it again tonight.

There are only two semi-acceptable outcomes.
1) it was merely a dried-out lizard carcass, the dusty bones of a lizard long gone, dragged out from its final resting place by a bored kitty.
Or,
2) it was just a string.

Maybe I'll deal with it tomorrow. If I have the strength. Keep me in your thoughts.
I LIKE lizards. I have fond lizard memories from my childhood. Stories that I just might share, should I recover from my grief in a timely manner.

[SOB]