Cat Tales, 8

That’s me looking stoic, prepared to wait it out

Some time later … my human looked at a thing she calls a calendar and had turned quite a few pages … I just knew a lot of days had passed.

In the early morning, the pernickety old woman said, “Ha, I hear the truck. I better go tell them where to park.”

Remembering the whole business in the roof that time ago, I hid.

The pernickety old woman came back inside with two men following her, both grey hairs like my human.

Neither of them took their boots off at the backdoor as is the custom. They walked in and out all through the kitchen, the living room next to it and the sunroom behind both.

The pernickety old woman darted in front of them, rolling up the rugs and getting things out of their way.

When they helped her move the refrigerator into the living room and parked it right in front of my hide-out, I’d had enough.

I scooted out of there and ran zig-zagging like a dervish-cat, circling them, then in front and then behind them. Thinking that if I could trip them over, they’d pick themselves up and go away.

The men just laughed and continued with their flicking measuring devices, pens and notebooks.

You’re surprised? I said they were grey hairs!

My human scooped me up and tucked me under her arm. She slid open a cabinet in the sunroom, took the drawer out completely, and put me in that cave.

“Stay there,” she said. “You out of their way and them out of your face.”

This is me looking taken aback. Did my human just tidy me out of the way?

Cat Tales, 7

The next day, while the pernickety old woman and I sat friendly in the red chair–me on a towel on her lap–I could feel little things crawling around on me. I scratched. Aah! So satisfying. I scratched more. Then I saw them! Little black specks jumping from me to my human.

“Eeeh!” the pernickety old woman said. “Fleas! I should’ve known, shouldn’t I?”

Unexpectedly, she flapped the ends of the towel over me, and started to struggle up out of the chair with me tight in her arms. I was so surprised that she didn’t just push me off, I didn’t struggle.

“Have to take some stern measures,” she said. “Hope you’ll forgive me.”

I couldn’t act out yes or no, because I didn’t know what she meant.

She took me into the bathroom, a hard, shining, tiled place, and shut the door behind us. She opened the taps that make the rain and waited, still holding me, until the water falling from the overhead thing steamed a little.

She stuck her hand under and said, “Well. Here goes. Clothes and all.” She stepped into the warm rain.

Fleas jumped off both of us and were swept down the drain.

When I got water up my nose, I sneezed and started to struggle. I miaowed. Got more water up my nose. “I want to get down!”

The pernickety old woman set me at her feet where I sneezed some more. I walked from the rain stall and shook my wet fur. Brrr. Cold down there at floor level. That warm rain was lovely, I realized. Walked back in.

The pernickety old woman had taken off all her coverings in the meantime and spread flower-scented suds all over herself. Then she let the rain wash it off her. There’s no logic to humans.

She turned off the taps. The rain stopped. She dried herself off with a pink towel, and then me with a washed-out green towel. She slung on her dressing gown and led me into the sun-room at the back of the house. Where she set the little kindergarten chair for me to sit there and continue to dry myself.

She tackled the remains of the flea plague by spraying the red chair and the rug and the couch with an insect-killing fog. She opened the windows and turned on the overhead fan to lift the sickly lemon-scent, and finally she set out a treat for me.

If all that’s what happens as a result of walking in and out and in and out of the warm rain she organizes, count me in next time. Though I will tell you, it will need to be a sunny day, just like it was today.

Cat Tales, 3

Me, the Hand-of-God, trying to get out of the house

The pernickety old woman has many unnatural ideas about me, as I said. They cause a lot of strife and strangering between us, as you might expect.

Strangering is when someone pretends they are a stranger and they stalk away with their tail high and their self-respect intact.

Our first great struggle was about me intending to do my Hand-of-God work in the night. Let me tell you, I have stood hours at the back door, miaowing sternly, or piteously, begging, or forceful. “Open the cage door,” I would cry. “Let me explore the night!”

The first few times she told me about the nocturnal critters native to her backyard. She’d sworn that they’d go unmolested.

“I’m the Hand-of-God. I wanna get to know them,” I cried. She turned her back on me, got on with getting dinner.

The following dozen stand-offs at the backdoor, she told me about the little deaths delivered to her by a neighbouring tom. The morning he brought her a snakelet in three pieces, she decided that none of her pets would ever join in the nightly carnage.

“Pets?” I snarled. I’ll show her who the pet is in this house! I stalked into the bedroom and hid under the bed. Causing, I might add, a lengthy battle at her bedtime, with the easily deflected indoor broom.

“Go! Have the run of the house,” she said.

My last 20 or 30 attempts to gain the night, she served up several more excuses, the weakest one about the busy road out front where two of my predecessors met their demise. “I’m a super cat,” I cried. “The Hand-of-God!”

She apparently thinks she can wean me from my instincts. “If my instincts can be dampened down with enculturation,” she said. “So can yours!”

I showed her my teeth in disgust. Predictably, she laughed. “Like it or lump it,” she said.