What the Pet Hair Eraser Learned

The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser showed up in a box on a Tuesday. BW had ordered it without telling me. (This is how most things arrive at our house now.) It was compact. Cordless. It had a purple trigger and a clear dust cup that looked like a little aquarium. I unboxed it the way you unbox things you didn't ask for—with the kind of care that says I respect this but I didn't vote for this.

The dog had been shedding like he was personally insulted by the existence of spring. The child's car seat looked like it had its own ecosystem. BW said the Eraser would fix everything. I said nothing. I plugged it in.

For exactly four days, the Bissell Pet Hair Eraser was the hero it was designed to be. It roared. It sucked. It filled that clear cup with a tornado of fur and dander and things I didn't want to identify. The couch began to look like a couch again. The car seats started breathing.

On day five, the child found it.

I don't know what she thought it was. A lightsaber, maybe. A microphone. Something that deserved to be activated in seventeen different locations. She ran through the house with it screaming PPPPPPPPP, which is what the Eraser sounds like when you hold the trigger down for longer than the trigger wants to be held down.

By evening the battery was gone. I charged it. By the next morning it was gone again. The Eraser had given everything it had. The clear cup was full of nothing. Just air. It had sucked so hard for so long that it had no more sucking left in it.

Now it lives in the garage on a shelf behind the Christmas lights. BW walks past it every day on the way to get the garden shears. Sometimes she sighs at it—not angry, just the sigh of someone who understands that objects cannot be trusted with children, that even the best ideas die in the hands of a 7-year-old with unlimited access to a power button.

The dog is still shedding. The couch is back to looking like it's covered in felt. The car seats have surrendered. I see the Eraser sometimes when I'm looking for my hedge trimmer. It's just sitting there. Purple. Quiet. Knowing what it could have been if the child had never found it.

BW says we should try again. Get a new one. I tell her maybe in the fall, when the child is at school more. She knows I'm lying. We both know the Eraser's real purpose now.

It's not to clean. It's to teach.

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