I heard the slam of the front door followed by a tumble of excited feet coming down the stairs. My quiet evening was about to be invaded. I turned in my chair and prepared myself for whatever chaotic nonsense might be coming around the corner in a few seconds. But I wasn’t prepared for this.

Clara’s beaming sweaty face appeared. “Dad!” she said, much too loud and completely unnecessarily. “Dad, look what I found in the ditch!”

I squinted my eyes in the dim basement light, recovering from the sudden change of volume in the room and my brain struggled to understand what she was holding in her hand. My heart slowly sunk into my toes. “What in the…” my mouth uncontrollably muttered.

The child interpreted this as an invitation and so she thrust the object closer to my face. Almost touching the heinous object to my nose. I recoiled backwards in disgust and fear.

“Clara! Clara, stop!” I pushed her away with my foot. “Hold very still and keep that thing away from me.”

Dangling from her dirty fist was a strip of shag carpet, perhaps a foot and a half long and several inches wide. It’s long dark brown piles were intermixed with grass clippings and cakes of dried mud. It hung like a dead rat dragged from a sewer pipe. A muskrat drown in a flood and held up triumphantly by its colorless tongue. Who knows what other tiny horrors hid within its shadows. My brain quickly imagined the plagues that this rope of death was peppering onto the floor of my basement.

“Clara! Why did you to bring that in here?! I need you to take that out and put it in the big trash can in the garage. I need you to do this right now. Do you understand? Don’t take it anywhere else. Put it directly in the trash can.”

She was obviously offended. “But why?”

“What do you mean, why? Because it’s a disgusting old piece of carpet and I need you to remove it from our home before it kills every last one of us.”

She held it away from herself and furrowed her eyebrows. “It’s carpet?” she asked casually.

“Of course it’s carpet. What in the world did you think it was?”

She looked back and forth from the dark dead thing and me several times before speaking in a low embarrassed tone. “Well. I thought it was a mustache.”

I blinked.

She blinked.

I suddenly realized she was somehow serious. “What are you talking about? How could you think that was a mustache?”

She grabbed the two sides of the ragged thing in both of her hands and held it sideways in the air. “You know… I thought it was like a fake mustache, like something someone would wear as a disguise.” She started to hold the carpet up to her face to show me what she meant. The rotten threads hung to both sides of her lips, the edges dropping down unevenly below her shoulders.

I lunged forward and pulled the carpet away from her mouth. It was probably too late. I closed my eyes and gave myself a few seconds to breathe before I continued talking. “Clara… Just… Just take it to the trash can, please.”

She shrugged and started towards the garage, whipping the nasty object around in the air as she left, leaving a cloud of brown smoke in her wake.

I watched her go, to be certain that the threat left the house as ordered, and then I slowly walked into the bathroom to wash my hands. As I stood at the sink I let the warm water run over my hands in an attempt to wash the revolting image of the fuzzy diseased worm from my mind. Then I leaned forward and took a long critical look at my mustache in the mirror.