Curiosity Killed the Cat, Saved the Dog, and Made for a Generally Strange Day

Just a fun, and hopefully funny, little story about the dangers of curiosity.

This is one of those things that is inexplicable, nonsensical, it possess no reason. One day, as I was walking through the parking lot outside my local Safeway trying to find my car, I saw a bumper sticker that captured my attention. It said “I ‘Heart’ My” followed by a picture of a paw print. I am utterly incapable of understanding why, but I was instantly, overwhelmingly, bafflingly curious about this person who ‘hearts’ their ‘paw print,’ so much so that for a second, or even a minute, I was unable to look away from the sight of it. Eventually, however, I managed to pry my eyes away from that remarkable, enthralling bumper sticker and take in the vehicle to which it was adhered. It was some kind of minivan shaped affair, though somewhat sleeker in a way, with a bright, practically florescent, lime green paint job. The whole confection was positively sparkling, as if it had just been thoroughly scrubbed by an entire company of car washing professionals, if such a thing exists. Quite contrary to my own will I felt my feet begin to carry me toward this lime green monstrosity. Though I chastised them repeatedly for their foolishness in this little escapade I found as they carried me right up to the back window that I was not nearly as resistant to the idea of getting a closer look as I had at first believed myself to be. So, I relented to the demands of my feet, though, in actuality, it must surely have been my curiosity that was driving me, rather than my feet. Curiosity killed the cat. I wondered if, perhaps, the owner had a cat, but found it rather more plausible that they had a dog. Bumper stickers seem much more like a dog thing, cats are far too dignified to be represented by a magnet stuck to the rear end of a car.

 Finding myself standing within an arms length of the rear window of this incomprehensibly and irresistibly bewitching car it suddenly occurred to me to wonder if anyone, besides myself, had noticed just how bizarrely I was behaving. Self-consciously I looked around myself and discovered that the parking lot was nearly deserted. The only people I could see were an elderly couple strolling hand in hand down the next aisle over. I would be lying most heinously to myself if I said that I was not a little relieved to find that my unreasonably peculiar behavior was not being noticed. But I would also be lying if I said that I was not at least minutely disappointed owing to the fact that I would really have liked a reason not to do what I knew I was going to do presently, particularly since I could already tell that I was not going to be able to stop myself.  Casting one last glance over my shoulder I crossed the last bit of space left between me and the back window of the car then cupping my hands around my eyes I leaned in and looked inside. The lighting and angle was bad so I could not see much besides a collection of beads hanging from the rear-view mirror. My curiosity was caught by this new piece of information like a lose thread on a nail; the owner of this car ‘hearted’ their pet and hung gaudy beads from their rear-view mirror.

I wanted to get a closer look so I walked around the side of the car to the driver’s side door. I pressed my eyes to the window just like I had done in the back. From here I could see that there were five or six strands of pink and gold beads, a lot like the ones you get at Mardi Gras but gaudier, which is surprising since I hadn’t realized that was possible. I imagined how the beads must sway as the car went around corners, speed up, or slowed down. I wondered if they rattled together in a little bead tango when the car went over bumps in the road. Perhaps that was their purpose, maybe the owner of this bewilderingly, in fact, almost frighteningly, green car liked the sound of dancing, rattling beads. Suddenly, unexpectedly I wanted�"needed�" to hear those beads tango, I thought for sure that it must be some kind of beautiful and enchanting sound. Impulsively, just like everything else I had done in the last five minutes, I reached down and tugged on the door handle. I was only mildly surprised to find that the door was unlocked. I would like to say that I still had a good enough hold on my sanity to realize that getting into a strangers car was a really bad idea but to be honest I had pretty much given up on stopping myself at this point.

            So I slid into the driver seat and gently shut the door behind me. For a moment I just sat there trying to get a feel for what kind of person sits where I was sitting, had gaudy pink and gold beads and panted their car lime green.  I ran my hands over the steering wheel gripping it at the ten and two positions. I glanced at the beads and then reached up to tap them, setting them swaying. They rattled very faintly and I smiled faintly back. I reached up again and pulled the whole tangle of them up and to the side, I released them and listened as they rattled in a truly satisfactory way. My smile became a grin and I glanced around to see what would be my next source of absurd amusement in this absurd car.  

My eyes landed on the passenger’s seat and I was momentarily blinded by the fluorescent pink seat cover. How had I missed this as I was peaking in the windows and getting into the car? It was pinker than a blushing pig with the word princess emblazoned in bold black cursive across the back and a zebra print border running around the edges of the seat. On the seat itself there was a giant, fluffy cushion, also pink, that looked like something the crown jewels might be displayed on. This was for the dog I was sure, I bet Princess was even the dog’s name. Which would make it a girl, or so I hoped, because otherwise the poor dog would undoubtedly have some serious masculinity issues.

I didn’t think my eyes could take looking at all of that pink for much longer so I directed my attention to the console separating the passenger and driver’s seats. There were two cup holders one of which was holding a half empty bottle of pomegranate flavored water. The bottle itself was tall, skinny and plastic, like a model. Though I could clearly see that it had no lips, lush and pouting or otherwise (I hadn’t gone quit that crazy, yet), I could swear I almost heard it whispering hypnotically to me, trying to bring me under its spell, saying, “Hey, hey, look at me. Don’t I look elegant and sophisticated? Don’t I look like I spend every Christmas skiing in the Swiss Alps and every summer lounging on the beaches of the Bahamas?” Of course I found all of these outrages claims to high society perfectly ridiculous. The other cup holder had nothing but a crumpled up wrapper from Burger King. Neither of these things held much interest for me, so I looked over to the passenger’s side again having decided to go through the glove box next, but, to my horror, as I looked over I saw what appeared to be a giant pink blob coming from the direction of the Safeway and pushing a cart straight towards me.

 I pushed through my sudden panic and only somewhat irrational fear of the giant pink blob and soon realized that what I had at first taken to be some kind of unbelievably, excruciatingly hideous alien life form was actually a considerably more than slightly overweight lady in a hot pink track suit. And that is when I knew without a doubt that this woman was the owner of this car. The car that I was currently sitting in. I knew I was in trouble and I needed to get out of there but at the same time I just could not look away. So I watched as she came closer and more details about her came into focus. She was middle aged, with obviously fake blond hair that reached the height of a small mountain on top of her head. She was wearing bright fuchsia lipstick and way too much blush, her eyelashes were voluptuous and fake. Her unnaturally colored lips were pursed in a way that seemed meant to look sexy but only succeeded in making her look like she was displeased with something, her weight perhaps. And she held her nose in the air as if there were a bad smell.

Her shopping cart was full of bags but I couldn’t see what was in them. What I could see was the Chihuahua, dressed in a little pink rhinestone encrusted sweater and sitting on a fuzzy pink blanket in the child’s seat. They were very close now coming up on the back the car and I could see the poor dog well enough to be able to tell that it was nervous and unhappy in the shopping cart, its eyes were almost bulging out of its head as they darted around as if looking for an escape. It was shaking so much that I could see its large ears vibrating like a washing mashing during the spin cycle.

The woman was at the back door of the car now clumsily fumbling around in the giant purse that was sitting next to the dog with fat sausage fingers tipped with ruby slipper red polish. She was obviously looking for her car keys, she must not have realized that she left her car unlocked. I knew that it was only a matter of time before she found me sitting in her car planning to go through her glove box. I turned back around in the seat hunching down so that she wouldn’t be able to see me from the back of the car. From there I listened as she opened the back door and started unloading her groceries into the car. The whole time she was working she talked to the dog, whose name as it turned out was, in fact, Princess, in a sickly sweat and unnaturally high pitched voice. “Oh, look Princess here are mommy’s canned soups! And here are her weekly magazines! Oh and here is Princess’s yummy, yummy food. Isn’t it yummy princess? Isn’t it yummy?”

            She went on and on like that, her commentary about her groceries periodically interrupted by grunts as she hefted the bags into the car. Eventually she finished saying, “All done Princess! Look mommy’s all done!” then I heard the back door close. I was hoping with everything I had that she would go return the cart next giving me the opportunity to slip out and away before she could notice me. I was mustering up the courage to look and see if she had left when I heard the passenger door open. I whipped my head around to see the lady bending into the car with the little Chihuahua under her arm saying, “Time to get into the car princess, time to get into the car!” Then she looked up and her eyes met mine. I will swear up and down (when no one’s listening) that time itself, seemingly as surprised as she was by the situation, was shocked into a brief moment of immobility as we looked into each other’s eyes, and then my eardrums nearly exploded as she opened her mouth wider than I would have thought possible and shrieked like a banshee with its hair lit on fire. Her face was contorted and distorted into an ugly yet almost hilarious mask and she jerked away from the car. She jerked back and then she just kept going, trouble was that her lower half wasn’t backing away quite as fast as her upper half and for a moment I thought she must have tripped in her haste, but then her scream suddenly cut off and her eyes rolled back into her head. The world seemed to go in slow motion as she continued to tip over giving me time to realize that she was falling wrong for her to have tripped. She was stiff as a board and seemed to just be tipping over backward. When she was halfway to the ground the Chihuahua launched itself from her arms, landing on the cushion in the passenger’s seat with a soft whump at the same time as the lady hit the ground with a load thud. That was when time regained its regular pace.

The lady was passed out cold on the ground, the Chihuahua was, thankfully unharmed, on its cushion, and I sat stunned in the driver’s seat. The Chihuahua looked up at me for moment, its eyes wide with surprise, then turned in its seat to look out at its owner lying on the ground.  It stared for a moment, cocked its head to one side, then the other and slowly it began to growl softly at first then louder, then it started barking hopping around on the seat in its little sweater. It sounded vicious. Next thing I knew it had launched itself from the car, springboarded off its master’s excessive stomach, and raced off across the parking lot. Panicked I threw open the driver’s door and sprang from the car to go after it, but by the time I reached the other side of the car it was far of in the distance barking a little victory bark and I just didn’t have the heart to make it come back. I looked down at the woman passed out on the ground beside me with her mouth hanging open and her arms flung out to her sides. I looked out into the distance where the Chihuahua had disappeared.  I looked back at the lady on the ground for a moment and then, taking my cue from the Chihuahua I took of sprinting across the parking lot toward my car and, hopefully, sanity.