Laura offered to have us housesit for her, so we went to learn how to take care of her animals. None of them are as needy as Tesuji, except for the dogs. They tried to give away one of the dogs, Rosie, three times, but she keeps coming back. She is an alarming combination of puppy and train, with the energy and interest in humans of the one, and the massive force onslaught of the other. As soon as the dogs were allowed inside, Rosie ran to each person in turn and jumped onto them with her front paws to sniff their faces. We were standing in a little hallway between three rooms, so Rosie had to make use of every inch to wriggle and turn from one person to the next. The other three dogs wanted rather than demanded attention; they rubbed legs and chased each other, and sometimes they shuffled over to their water bucket to slop some up. If not for Rosie's intense sniffing and slam dancing, the dogs would have seemed normal. Before Laura put the dogs back into confinement behind the office door, she asked us if we wanted Rosie, just in case. Even if I wanted her, I'd be afraid that she'd eat Tesuji like she killed and ate one of Laura's chickens.
For the next couple of hours, while we made a gingerbread house with Laura's children and Kay, the dogs scratched at the office door and howled as though there was a beast after their lives. Laura's five-year-old, Zeb, sprinkled gummi bears on the roof and sides of the house with enthusiastic determination, until they had overtaken the structure. The seven-year-old, Sadie, rammed twizzlers through the windows like a fallen tree. In a sick twist, the manufactureres had added sugar people, a grandmother and two children, to watch as their house was demolished. Anne took particular pleasure in describing the carnage and got Laura's husband Paul to take pictures. She wants to get another house and a video camera to more thoroughly present the tragedy of the grandmother. Shots of monster hands, walls being torn away, and that sugar face staring up at the sky and smiling.