Let me tell you a story about a hole.

A big gaping black hole in the floor of my house, upstairs.

From the time when I climbed up on a ladder

to fix something in my daughter's room,

and underneath me a floorboard cracked. It opened up this freaky-looking chasm, not the size of a

burrito, but like a big burrito. A burrito stuffed with pure darkness.

I'm honestly scared of this whole.

And I was supposed to fix it before something bad happened, but I kept putting it off.

And then, something bad happened.

What happened was,

What happened was,

our daughter's hamster, Mango, escaped from her cage and she

didn't just climb under a blanket or hide in a corner, she went down into the hole, into this yawning vortex of doom, which

means she entered the secret infinite maze of the inside of our very old house.

Now, Mango was a fat little golden fluff ball,

not the kind of creature who would survive long without fresh water and food.

We looked everywhere.

Occasionally we thought we heard rustling in a closet or under a dresser and we'd shine our lights in there

nothing. 24 hours passed. 48 hours passed. We tried to go on with our normal routines, but we all felt sad and on edge.

It was like the whole house had a toothache.

Finally, on the third day, we gave up.

We just had to swallow hard and accept the fact that our sweet little mango, who'd been our daughter's 16th birthday present, who used to nibble fresh raspberries right out of our

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