OCTOBER, 1997
Winter’s first snow blankets the remains of autumn.
And inside the house, for the third morning in a row, there is poop just everywhere.
It appears to be horse poop. No one knows why it’s there, but it’s a pattern at this point.
Naturally, the first suspects were the horses.
The first theory was that, sometime during each of the three nights, the smaller, weirder horse wandered into the house, ran around everywhere trying to figure out how to escape, and was just shitting the entire time.
However, horses weigh roughly a thousand pounds and basically have rocks for feet, so pulling this off undetected would have been impossible. The horses were therefore temporarily ruled out as suspects, and we broadened our investigation to include the other pets and family members.
As usual, Maddy seemed guilty.
Murphy and Charlie were harder to get a read on.
Nobody else was fessing up, either.
A few days later, the case took a mysterious turn when a single, large pile of horse poop appeared in the children’s bedroom, looking exactly as it would upon exiting a horse—indicating that it was either created by the horses within the bedroom or arranged to look that way.
This strengthened the case against both the horses and the children. Upon further questioning, the children began crying and screaming. They said they would “never do that.”
They pleaded for everyone to “please believe” them.
Everyone was disturbed by the notion that the children may have gone out into the night, collected horse poop, and sculpted it into a pile on the floor of their own bedroom: the children because children hate being accused of things like collecting and arranging animal poop, and the adults because that is the behavior of future criminals.
It was a dark time. We were all suspects, plagued by doubt, haunted by possibility.
And the piles continued to appear.
Then, early one morning, we were awakened by an ominous thumping sound.
I think we were all scared of it, until we realized that it might be exactly what we had all been waiting for: an opportunity to catch the suspect in the act!
We clustered in the living room, pausing to acknowledge each other with disdainful, I-told-you-it-wasn’t-me glances before investigating the noise.
As we crept closer, we could see the back door rattling with each thump. Something was trying to get in through the dog door. . . .
In a moment, we’d know the answers to the questions we’d been asking for weeks—“Who the fuck has been doing this to us? Is it the neighbors?? Which neighbor is it? Do we know anyone who hates us enough to do this?”—and, all the way to the door, we mentally revised our theories, impatient to find out who was right, but terrified to know.
Then there it was: the answer. Standing on the other side of the door with a face full of frozen horse poop.
The rest of the story pretty much told itself.
Murphy was sentenced to nighttime house arrest and a stern talkin’-to.
From “Solutions and Other Problems,” by Allie Brosh, to be published by Gallery Books.
