"Momma, why are there never any shoeboxes around the house?"

I grew up in a house for the disabled and clinically insane and witnessed more gruesome deaths than any child should have while growing up, I realized in the course of conversation today. I'm not talking about my family. I'm talking about my pets.

Our house was always sort of a wayward house for strays and castaway animals, but in retrospect, maybe that wasn't so good for them. There wasn't one of us in that household without blood on our hands. If there's a Stephen King in the animal kingdom, he's probably written stories about that house. Take a look at the parade of pets and their eventual fate:

Name: Boots
Type: Cat
Bio: From all accounts, Boots was a friendly cat, but he despised me, probably because I was a baby/toddler he had to put up with in the last years of his life.
Method of death: My mother ran over him in the driveway with her Pontiac. Twice. After she hit him the first time, she hit him again as she pulled up to see what she hit. She'd earlier tried to take him out by driving off while he slept on the roof of the car. She noticed he was there about a mile down the road.

Name: Muffin
Type: Dog
Bio: Like Boots, Muffin was around long before me. Her opinion of me was about the same as Boots, too.
Method of death: One of the few who made it to natural causes, but not before she managed to get tangled in a barbed wire fence at the edge of our property.

Name: Tasha
Type: Dog
Bio: My middle sister's Cocker Spaniel. She got her when I was about 4, so once again...it's the pet dislikes the toddler syndrome.
Method of death: Another one who made it to natural causes, namely a stroke that left her paralyzed and us forced to put her down. Tasha was probably the only animal truly to evade the curse in my lifetime.

Name: Ginger
Type: Cat
Bio: My first pet, a calico cat. She was the longest lived of any of our pets, living until she was about 20.
Method of death: She was a 20-year-old cat! Ginger was a survivor. She survived two pregnancies (sorry, Bob Barker), some sort of disease that made her skinnier than an Olsen twin and the misfortune of sleeping under the hood when my mother started her car.

Name: Chastity
Type: Cat
Bio: A black cat, one of the kittens from Ginger's first litter. My youngest sister claimed her.
Method of death: Like mother, like daughter. Chastity chose to sleep under the car hood at the time we were leaving for one of my Pee Wee League baseball games. Unlike Ginger, no one noticed that she was under the hood until the next morning, although we did notice the car was making a funny noise. This time, my dad was the driver. It was the first time I ever saw him cry.

Name: Ashley
Type: Cat
Bio: Another black cat, one of the kittens from Ginger's second litter. My youngest sister claimed her. Ashley was a sweet cat with a squeaky mew that she couldn't even sputter out half of the time.
Method of death: Some mysterious infection. Her last several weeks, I (as the usual designated home vet of the family) had to feed her with a medicine dropper, which she hated. She had a decent lifespan, but her mother outlived her by years.

Name: Sampson
Type: Cat
Bio: Big orange fuzzball, another from Ginger's second litter. My middle sister claimed him but left him with us when she left for college.
Method of death: This one was my fault. In his old age, he had the unfortunate habit of sleeping soundly in our driveway. I backed over him on the way to work while housesitting for my parents. He was their last cat.

Name: Bonnie
Type: Dog
Bio: My oldest sister's Cocker Spaniel. We took her in after my sister's divorce. Like most inbred Cockers, she became blind, deaf and foul-smelling in her later years. I was pretty much the only one in the family who liked her, because she was the first dog who liked me.
Method of death: I'd rather not think about it. She escaped from the fence one night, and being blind and deaf, became impossibly lost in the woods behind our house. No one ever found her.

Name: Freeway
Type: Cat
Bio: Gray tiger cat who my middle sister, as the cat's name might indicate, found on the freeway while at college. Somehow, she ended up staying at our house rather than with my sister.
Method of death: Something gruesome. Like Bonnie, Freeway disappeared in the woods behind our house. However, she had all of her senses and never strayed far from home, so more than likely, some sort of wild animal got a hold of her.

Name: George
Type: Cat
Bio: Anti-social black cat my youngest sister brought home from college.
Method of death: Unknown. He was the only animal that we kids actually took with us when we moved out. When my sister sold her house, however, she gave him to the people who were moving in. He was pretty old by that point and probably died soon afterward.

Name: Penelope
Type: Parakeet
Bio: My only pet bird. She started out promising, but...
Method of death: ...after I left her cage open, Freeway got a hold of her. She managed to escape somewhat unharmed, possibly because Bonnie chased Freeway away, but she was a mental basketcase afterward. She lived another two years but never made another sound. I'm ruling this one the inability to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Name: Lucky
Type: Dog
Bio: My grandmother's Cocker Spaniel left with us after her death. A cowering, unstable wreck who would shiver helplessly any time there was a thunderstorm. When taken to the vet, he would panic to the point of convulsions and lose control of his bowels. My parents despised him thanks to his quirky personality and inability to be housebroken, but I always had a soft spot for him. I should mention that we bought him for my grandmother as a replacement companion following the death of her black pug, Brandy -- a dog who would eat nothing but bananas. It seems raising mentally ill animals was her specialty.
Method of death: Not surprising for a high-strung dog, he had a stroke. He was the last dog at my parents' house.

Name: Trixie
Type: Dog
Bio: A mutt I took in as a puppy from a friend of mine while I was in the 8th grade. The most loyal dog I ever had, although this loyalty became hostility toward anyone whom she didn't recognize in the house. She was miserable whenever not around the family, particularly my father.
Method of death: Like Sampson, Trixie died on my watch while I was housesitting for my parents. She just collapsed after wildly panting for a few hours but before I realized something was seriously wrong. The vet couldn't determine a cause, but the symptoms I later realized mimicked a bloated stomach. She had already lost a leg to cancer.

Name: Xerxes
Type: Cat
Bio: Black and white cat who I rescued from my high school grounds at the end of my sophomore year. A huge cat and a fierce hunter -- he regularly killed mice, birds and squirrels -- but completely docile around people.
Method of death: His death was the biggest heartbreaker for me. He once came home with a gaping wound in his back, and when we took him to the vet, we found out one of our neighbors had shot him. The vet wanted to put him down, but we refused. I nursed him back to health, applying medicine to that disgusting wound each day, and he eventually had a complete recovery. Several years later, he went missing, and we later found him dead in the garage. He had been beaten to death, presumably by that same white trash neighbor who shot him the first time.

My parents never got any more pets after Lucky, except for the numerous squirrels that my mother loves to feed every day. I mention that only in case PETA is planning on running an immediate intervention at their house. The Amityville Pet Horror curse at that house is over.