My Dog Smells Dead People

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.


Weird things have been happening since the day I moved into my nephew's house.  Like one of the first nights my Miss Daisy Dog, who is half blind and deaf but still has a great sniffer, pointed her nose at the corner of the door leading into the garage and growled.  The same garage where my brother-in-law died.  She did it again two more times that night so I knew if I wanted to get any sleep someone was going to check out the garage. And it sure as hell wasn't going to be me.

I've survived gun battles, grenades, narco-blockades, attempted truck stealing, and a pistol at the head of a drummer in Reynosa, but I was too chicken shit to open the door of the garage because my dog growled. I was alone in the house and wondering who to call.  A neighbor? At 10:30 at night? Even if you don't know any of them or even have a phone number?  911?  Does a growling dog constitute an emergency?  In the end, I called the number on the card left by the police officer the day he responded to the 911 call my nephew made when he found his dad.  At least he knew the story about what happened here and, maybe, just maybe, he wouldn't think I was a big flake. He sent over a couple of patrol officers and they banged on garage door announcing, "Marion police."

If his ghost was in the garage, he was gone by the time the police arrived.

The water softener isn't working. The water in Marion is worse than the water in Mexico. The TV in the living room makes everyone look like green men from Mars.  The light on the front of the house quit working for a while. I replaced the light bulb to no avail. It magically started working again.  And the garbage disposal quit working so my other brother-in-law (not Alfonso) replaced it.  He's also replaced a leaky faucet, wax ring on the toilet because of a leak, and a grounded electrical outlet that kept tripping.

Then there was the home phone problem.  I could call out or receive a call for about 10 seconds and then would be cut off on every single phone in the house. I bought a new phone and still the same thing so Mediacom came out and replaced the modem. After that I was able to call out, but sometimes ringing in it would be dead and the caller would get a message saying the number was temporarily unavailable. This is not acceptable when trying to reach a 13-year-old who is home alone.  Mediacom came and replaced the modem again except this time the installer couldn't test it because apparently the whole neighborhood was down due to a cut in the fiber optics.  For 3 days.

Everything was working for almost an entire week when today the phone, internet and cable goes on the fritz. Then the smoke detectors go off.  All of them. At the same time. Which apparently is a frequency the dog can still hear because she went nuts. And then just like that they stopped until 5 minutes later they'd go off again. This continued for about 3 more rounds while I tied to figure out which one is the bad boy.  Andrew had a piano recital so I ended up disconnecting all detectors and tomorrow I will buy new ones.

Obviously the phone, cable and internet are back up and I was able to post this. For how long, who knows? And, please, Miss Daisy, please don't smell any more dead people.