I’m convinced our sofa is part Venus flytrap. It seems to “eat” anything and everything that comes into contact with it, save living breathing animals and people.
It regularly ingests the remote control for the TV, socks, change, bottle caps, hairbrushes, wrappers and anything else that finds its way onto the cushions. When I say the sofa “eats” everything, I don’t mean items end up under the cushions – they end up deep inside the sofa.
Each end of the sofa [it’s a sectional] features a recliner. The cushions don’t come off any part of the sofa so it’s not a matter of simply tossing them aside. Oh, no. You must kneel in front of the sofa, reach between the cushions, find the “esophagus” and reach down into the depths of the sofa. The holes are only big enough for my forearm so once I get my arm in there, I can only use my hand to grope around blindly. It’s kind of creepy and it’s when I have my arm deep in the sofa that I have bizarre thoughts like, “What if I grab a snake?” As if there are snakes in my house, much less inside my sofa!
One time my husband’s four-cell Maglite flashlight disappeared. We searched the house, we patted down the kids and looked in our cars. The flashlight was nowhere to be found and my husband eventually resigned himself to the fact that it simply vanished into thin air. He so often lamented the loss of his flashlight, I bought him a new one.
It was around the time the flashlight disappeared that the recliner section of the sofa wouldn’t quite fold down properly. I inspected the mechanisms and found nothing broken, missing, stuck or bent. I didn’t find the flashlight either. Nothing gave a clue as to why the recliner resisted folding. It was several months later – and after I bought him the new Maglite – that I was groping inside the recliner for the missing remote control when I touched something that felt suspiciously like a flashlight. Sure enough, the missing flashlight was wedged in the workings of the recliner. It was very scratched and banged up, but it still worked. It has “personality” now.
My son Zack’s cell phone mysteriously disappeared the other day. He has been sleeping on the couch while he has been home on leave from Iraq.
“Mom, my phone is gone,” he said. “It was right here on the couch.”
Ah-ha! No mystery here. The trick was in figuring out which section of the couch was the culprit. I called his cell phone. From the depths of the sofa, we could hear his cell phone faintly ringing. Rolling up our sleeves, we dropped to our knees in front of the sofa and, plunging our arms deep within the frame of the sofa, began a “cell phone-ectomy.”
“I got it,” I called out triumphantly as I held his cell phone aloft.
  Once when performing a “television remote-ectomy,” I pulled a hammer from the bowels of the sofa. I have no idea why a hammer was on the sofa to begin with, but my husband was happy to have it back.
The dog sleeps on one corner of the couch. I put a blanket there and that is the only place on the furniture he is allowed to lounge. So far the sofa hasn’t devoured him, but if he ever goes missing, I know the first place I am going to look.
 – Renee Worthing
P.S.  Forgive my little shout-out here – “Hi Gladys!”