fleabitten

Sorry. You've heard this before. Granny is fleabitten - again - no, not just metaphorically, although that's also true -literally, despite all expensive libations continually administered to animals. How come Beloved never gets bitten too? He doesn't. Granny not comforted by notion, here, that she is delicious, and he isn't. Beloved doesn't even believe it IS fleas. Bedbugs? he suggests. (Thanks.) Fungus? he suggests, eyeing the cluster of bites in a place so intimate only he could be invited to view them. Granny has to google 'fleabite', find distressing - but familiar -pictures, find Beloved, find Beloved's reading glasses, lead them and him to her laptop, show him the picture before he admits that perhaps she could be right. (She is.) What are scientists for then? she asks. They demand empirical evidence, here is empirical evidence. He agrees it is empirical evidence of the presence of a flea or fleas. So now what? she asks him. No answer. WHAT ARE SCIENTISTS FOR THEN? He doesn't answer that either. All that knowledge he has about seagulls, pigeons and sheep, on the one hand, robots, philosophy, on the other IS NO DAMN USE. (In this case.)

Forget high-tech husbands (or unhusbands). Back to sprays, vacuum cleaners, low tech stuff: against the fleas; to aloe vera, cut from the garden: against the bites. And to shutting doors to keep animals, especially the cat, out of her office. (Easier said than done. Cats, like fleas - and (un)husbands sometimes - tend to sneak in unannounced.)