It’s like 10:45pm, dark out. Middle of the city. Presumably, we’re talking about this “Twilight except with Mole Men” idea I’ve been working out all day.* Same route as every other night, no big deal. We pass a tree,  and out of the corner of my eye, I see a raccoon peeking its adorable head at us.

“Hey,” I say, “that’s a raccoon.”

When bad things happens very quickly, my mind doesn’t really have time to react. When I was 18, a truck hit my car, exploding all the windows into little death shards (half of which ended up in my underpants), and bending the whole car into a sort of horseshoe shape. I should have been upset, and got out of the car and socked that guy in the nose. But it happened too fast. So instead, I pulled over, halfway into a bus shelter (cause the car was a U) and asked someone waiting for the bus (in the bench I was parked on) if they saw that. Yes. They saw that.

So, anyway, what happened was this:

Remy tried to chase it off. Wendy tugged on the leash. Remy flipped over onto the sidewalk, and yelped. Maybe because he was embarrassed, but more likely because he was lying on the sidewalk belly up with a tiny feral monster running towards him.

So, Remy got up and staggered away, looking back at the snarling thing as it followed him, as Wendy screamed and dragged him towards her. In a single moment, I found myself standing right between the dog and the raccoon trying to bite him.

There’s a lot of things you can do, standing between a dog and a raccoon. I won’t list them here, but I’ll give you a moment  to go over them in your head.

…

What I, unlike you, went with is the old “lean over the attacker, making myself look big, and saying ‘HEY. HEY. HEY.’ in a commanding voice” trick. You may recall that this is how you’re supposed to handle bear attacks. I think it was in Family Guy. Wendy, to her credit, took a more proactive and reasonable “pull the dog away from the damn thing” approach.

It might have worked, I’m not sure. Four seconds later, the raccoon ran back and scurried up the tree, followed by five of its babies, which had been watching from beneath a parked car. We ran a few houses down, and checked Remy’s butt, which was free of bite marks. Hallelujah.

Twenty minutes later, towards the end of the walk, I saw The Goonies projected on someone’s entire wall through their apartment window. Which is cool.

And that’s how that story ends.

* Don’t steal that, by the way. That’s my kids college fund.