Boy With a Bear Tattoo, though almost finished, is not quite there yet, but to clear the fluff in my head in the meantime, I took my husband's advice and wrote a short story from my cat, Jemma's, point of view. What resulted is what lies below, and it is hopefully humorous and relatable for all the cat owners or feline enthusiasts who happen to read this blog! This is also the most ridiculous story I've ever composed in my years of writing, so here's to the utter absurdity below!
Let me know what you think in the comments, and have a happy weekend!
~Abigail
WHEN
MY FEMALE RETURNS
My favorite part of
the day is when the Female returns home. The Male is okay, but he adores me
less than the Female, so I prefer her. Also, the Female raised me from
youngling to the equivalent of an adolescent, so she and I share a bond
established the day she adopted me from my foster family.
She and I were
inseparable, save for the agonizing times when she invited other Males and
Females of various sizes and speaking at various detestable volumes over to our
sanctuary; I quickly learned to recognize the sound of the bell that signals
the arrival of one such Male or Female violating our home. When I hear the
sound, or as it happens these days (the bell mercifully has not sounded since
moving homes) an unfamiliar knocking sounds on the door, I scurry away as
quickly as possible and seek refuge beneath the bed. From my spot down the
hall, I watch them, but Males and Females are terribly boring and dull to
observe. They sit. Or they stand around. Or they eat. And they jabber
incessantly all the while about nothing significant, like the fact that they
are disturbing my solitude with my Female. But she waves at me from down the
hall from time to time. I see her but pretend not to notice.
She should not have
opened our doors to such strangers without my permission. We talked about this
at least a dozen times.
She knows this.
Then she brought home
the Male and disappeared for a while, so I settled for the smaller Female that
lived with us in the sanctuary with many rooms and many beds to hide beneath
and many doors to hide behind and leap out at my older brothers. The Black one
was my favorite to disturb; the colorful words that flew with the spittle from
his mouth put the rainbow to shame. He hated me. I enjoyed him. The Brown one
played along for a while until he tired and screamed at me to leave him alone.
I didn’t, of course. Where’s the fun in that? The Orange one…well…the Orange
one had some mental problems of his own, and I sensed his Female loved him out
of pity than for his obviously lacking brains. He was what the Females call “sweet,”
I think, although why they use flavor words to describe us disturbs me.
Whatever they say, we are not sweet.
I wondered about the
other one I smelled from time to time, the female of my kind whose faint and
fading scent I occasionally caught on the blanket, window pillow, and some of
my older toys given to me on the day of my adoption. But I thought little of
it. I still think little of it, but sometimes my Female hugs me close and
doesn’t let me go for a while; I tolerate this, sensing that she is upset or
even, I think, sad. She cries sometimes when she sees that blanket we left
behind in the move or when she sees me doing something particular, although I
never know exactly what. Maybe it reminds her of that missing female. I do what
I can for her when she gets like that, though I don’t understand it. But I try
to cheer her up when I can.
Back to what I was
saying; the Female brought home a Male, then they vanished except the days and
afternoons she came to see me. She laid out on her floor surrounded by papers
that crinkled when I walked on them, and I assumed my spot beside her, between
her arms, or stretched across one or more pieces of the crinkly paper until she
shooed me away so she might examine it. Didn’t she know I was comfortable?
The Orange one’s
Female and the Black one’s smaller female took care of me during that time. The
smallest Female of the household was less fun; she constantly invaded my
personal space. Some people have no bubbles. I put up with her, though, as my
burden to bear. She wasn’t all bad, not all the time.
Then one day my Female
returned, placed me in a box with small holes to peer out of and a wire door I
pressed my nose through when possible so she could obviously see how desperately I wanted out, and all this time, she
spoke to me in that weird, high-pitched voice she assumes when talking to me. I
don’t mind it, though; it’s one of my Female’s quirks, one of the ways she adores
me. But then my Female placed me inside a larger, weird shaped box—one of those
boxes that my brothers told me about. One of those boxes that they enjoy hiding
beneath and crawling around under when their Females and the Male of that
household try to grab them to bring them inside before dark (I never received
such treatment, for my Female pampered me indoors; I didn’t enjoy the times she
placed me outdoors with the strange smells and sounds and prickly grass that
tickled my toes).
So my female placed my
box inside one of those boxes that I so often saw her climb in and out of from
my observation window, got in, and then that large box roared to life and began
moving. I realized it then: I had been eaten alive. Apparently humans have a
pact with those larger, growling beast-boxes to be eaten by them and carried
places, much like how the mothers of my kind carry us by the back of the neck
in our mouths. When the beast-box or our mothers reach wherever it is we go,
they spit us out, unharmed.
Though I had been in
such situations before, I loathed every minute of them. I let my Female know my
feelings all the way to my new home, but she only talked to me in that voice of
hers and poked her long-foretoes through the holes in the wire door to touch my
face. Finding some comfort in her touch, I bumped my head against her
long-foretoes. She did nothing more to aid my situation, but I forgave her.
We arrived at our new
sanctuary, and I refused to leave my box for a time; it smelled funny, foreign,
and unfamiliar. Then my Female’s Male walked through the door sometime later,
and my Female pulled me out of the crate or carrier (that’s what they call it)
unceremoniously and placed me on the chair near the window. I hunkered down and
waited, curled unto as small a ball as I managed atop the soft, round pouch-blanket
she made me, staring at her fixedly and establishing a psychic connection with
her to tell her that I WANTED TO GO HOME.
She ignored me. I know
I got through to her, but she ignored me.
Over the days that
followed, I hid beneath the bed. I hid beneath the other bed in the second
room. I hid beneath the couch and chairs when I dared go into the room with the
door to the outside. I are when I felt hungry and when I felt empty, and she
fed me treats when she came home. I missed my brothers, especially the Brown
one who played with me sometimes.
Everyday my Female
left in the morning, promised to return home, and did later that afternoon
almost every day. While she was gone, I slept and ate my feelings. She warned
me against that, but what else was there to do? I was bored, sad, and lonely,
and I never felt like playing.
About a week or so later,
she brought home a squirming, tiny creature of boundless energy in that crate
she transported me in.
“Meet your new
brother,” she said and opened the wire door.
Brother? I recall asking, as I inched forward, wary
of what the crate contained. I sprang back with a sudden jolt when I saw what
she unleashed from the crate. He bounded out, leaping, fearless; he stopped
short when he saw me.
I remember I stopped
short, crouching, every muscle taut like one of those tightly-wound, coiled
springs my brothers and I played with. I had never seen one of us so tiny before. It was unnatural and unnerving.
This is absolutely definitely NOT my brother,
I said, and scuttled away.
Trip (for I later
learned that was his name—and what a ridiculous name at that) lives up to his
name, and I heard (and still hear) my Female and Male cry in alarm when he
attacks their feet and literally trips them up. All of this I watched with
slight amusement and slight alarm from beneath the bed down the hall. At least
when he terrorized them, he left me alone in peace.
Worst of all, when
they weren’t around, Trip followed me. He still does. Invades my space
constantly, though after that third or fourth day when I ventured out and
attacked him through the crinkly fish tube, swatted him a good many times, and
sat on his face once or twice when he tried to best me in wrestling, I have
learned not to mind his antics as much. It’s nice to have a brother again, even
if this one whines when I sit on him when he knows perfectly well that he is
puny and I am not and, more times than not, he bites me first, giving me the
lady’s right to finish it. The lungs on that one. How he yowls. For hours
straight every night, shut away in the hall room as he is to relieve me of
Trip-sitting duty and letting me, my Female, and her Male sleep, and also to
prevent him from destroying anything at night.
But I digress.
As I said at the
beginning, my favorite part of the day is when my Female returns home from work
or school or wherever it is she goes off to during the day hours. The
ridiculous and dull mutt upstairs barks (he’s too dumb to recognize the people
living here—idiot), and the key turns in the lock. I sprint down the hall, Trip
on my back heels. For so puny a person, he’s fast.
My Female bares her
teeth in a way I’ve learned to recognize as joy as she calls our names and
places the soft-box-with-straps she wears on her back on the couch, and Trip
dances around her feet, batting the strings on the weird things covering her
toes. I never understood why she wears them to go outdoors; she never offered me any those times she tossed me in the
yard and the stiff, itchy grass prickled my
toes.
But it’s for the best
because I hate anything touching my toes except the hard floor that my claws
sometimes skid across (honestly why Males and Females like that kind of floor
is beyond me because it is entirely useless for chasing and running quickly
over unlike carpet) and carpet. I love carpet. Though my Female yells at me for
loving the carpet and kneading my claws in it. But it’s so soft and plushy and
is perfect for running and bounding and feels so nice on my toes, similarly to
how my fuzzy bed and pillows and some of the blankets my Female and her Male
have lying around on the couches and bed that I love sinking and kneading all
my toes into feel.
Anyway, she sets that soft-box-with-straps
down on the couch and I glance at it; sadly, it’s full of those box-not-boxes
made of that crinkly paper that I love to lay on but that my Female shoos me
off of. If the soft-box-with-straps were empty, I might crawl inside if I
wasn’t under constant fear of Trip careening off the couch or sharpening-ramp
onto my back or worse—my head—while I am defenseless and unable to hug him
close, bite his face, and sit on his head until he screams; after that, I let
him up and prepare for him to stand on his wobbly back legs to bite my neck. It’s
not like he’s predictable or anything. No, not at all.
I miss the days when I
was the ruthless terror preying on the Black one who cussed me out, the Brown
one who was nice until he screamed at me to stop, and the poor Orange who may,
as my Female says, lack some brains. Those days were fun. Now I’m constantly
watching my back because my Female asks me when she returns:
“Did you keep Trip out
of trouble?”
Always, I stare at her
unblinking, trying to silently communicate.
No.
Of course not.
Why would you think that?
She’s seen my brother in
action (he’s also adopted I add again in case you forgot as I’ve witnessed my
Female and her Male do quite often; they especially forget the jingling things
they keep in their pockets or sacks that look like ever so much fun to bat
around but that they scold us for touching). She knows the trouble Trip somehow
manages to achieve in the 0.5 seconds it takes to turn around, yet she asks me
if I keep him out of trouble every day. She might as well ask me to push a
boulder up a hill or sweep the floors or shut Trip up when he doesn’t get his
way.
Impossible tasks.
Today, for example,
Trip managed to climb up the chairs in the food room and then sprint across the
hard-and-slidey floor, leap onto the couches, and hurtle off my favorite chair
onto my back in less time than it takes me to consume the leftover tuna fish my
Female gives me from the can (which, I might add, is quick. Growing up with three
older brothers, if nothing else, taught me the fastest way to inhale tuna or
some such delicacy without diminishing the savory flavor). For that, I sat on
his face until he screamed and then chased him around for a time until I bored
of that game and he trotted off to create some other mischief while I bathed
and took a nap. Completely responsible things to occupy my time with I assure
you, and I’m certain my Female understands.
The fact that Trip
was, during this time, completely unsupervised is entirely beyond my control. Entirely.
Today my Female
returned, asked the usual questions, and has now settled down on the couch with
the portable glowing screen that sits on MY designated lapspace, so I hop onto
the couch and sit patiently by her side, watching her bald and declawed long-foretoes
dart across the clickey-pad. They look like fun to bat at, but I resist the
urge. I’m not Trip, after all. I maintain some dignity about me at all times,
unlike my uncouth hooligan of a bother. Brother. Same thing, I suppose.
She turns to me, and I
offer my chin to her to scratch, but she pets my head instead. Didn’t she see
my chin that I obviously wanted her to scratch? I nudge my chin against her
hand as she clearly didn’t get it beforehand.
Then I curl up by her
lap and move ever so subtly so that, before she realizes it, I am laying across
her arm and rendering her incapable of reaching the clickey-pads below the
glowing screen.
That should teach her
to put something on my personal lapspace, and besides, I know she needs the
distraction from time to time. To emphasize this, I purr, knowing she will feel
guilty about moving while I am doing so, but really, it’s for her benefit. She
needs the attention sometimes as much as I do.
I don’t hold grudges,
by the way, but I do appreciate when someone notices my demands and if not, I
tell them in the best way I know how. She bares her teeth at me again, and I
gaze up at her and blink lazily. She responds by also blinking. I blink back.
It’s a code we both learned that neither of us fully understand yet, but I
enjoy communicating with my Female this way. With her other hand, she waggles
her long-foretoes at me and they make a swishing noise that is irresistible to
my highly active and curious mind, so naturally, I bump my nose against the
tips of her long-foretoes, purring, and am delighted when she begins to scratch
my chin again with her remaining free hand.
Have you ever noticed
just how strange Males and Females’
hands are? They’re thin and oddly shaped, not like mine, which are perfect and
round and delicate and lovely and good at catching stuffed mice mid-air when my
Female tosses them to me. I’m “quite clever with my paws,” she says. Of course
I am. Why wouldn’t I be?
After a while, I yield
my Female’s arm to her, and her long-foretoes resume their darting across the
clickey-pads, but she stops occasionally to pet my head and scratch the spot between
my ears, which I like.
Did I ever tell you
about the times I’ve tried to help my Female and one of the other Females that
used to feed me delicious food by testing their clickey-pads? One morning, I
noticed the other Female’s glowing screen with the clickey-pad sitting on the
table that I am forbidden to walk over but do anyway because it’s there and I can walk on it and hopped onto the nearest
chair and poked my nose and eyes over the side of the table, sniffing for the
vanilla smell of that other Female that meant she was nearby. On the glowing
screen was a beautiful scene of colorful grass that didn’t prickle my toes and
flowers that looked absolutely scrumptious, but that I couldn’t eat. I waited a
minute or two, my curiosity building about the clickey-pad, and then I couldn’t
wait any longer.
I stood on my back
legs and placed my foretoes on the clickey-pad, and suddenly, odd black squiggles
appeared in the blank space in the middle of the flowers. I wondered if my
touching the clickey-pad and the squiggles were related, so I moved to another
section of the clickey-pad and tried again, and more squiggles appeared. Not only am I clever at catching things
with my paws like any other normal person, but I taught myself to decode the
secrets of the clickey-pad and the glowing screen.
Then the other Female
entered the room and I quickly put my foretoes back on the chair, sat, and
stared at her, willing her to understand clearly that I absolutely was not just
touching the clickey-pad. But instead of scolding me and shooing me out of her
seat (which wasn’t even that
comfortable), she pulled out another glowing screen, only this one fit
somewhere in her legs-but-not-legs and lacked a clickey-pad. How primitive. And
boring. She held up the glowing screen for a moment, making that odd choking
sound Males and Females do when they are amused or find something funny. I
didn’t get it.
But I understand that humans
often pull out their tiny primitive glowing screens when they find something
funny or cute and want to remember it forever or show their friends later. She
said she was sending me to my Female. I thought I understood that, too, but she
never sent me anywhere...but I knew that somewhere, my Female was seeing me me,
and I hoped it made her happy.
I
decide not to help my Female master the clickey-pad today, though, and lay my
head down to take a nap. Then the jingling begins, gradually growing louder,
and sure enough, he flops onto the couch beside me and immediately attacks my
neck. Silently, I look up, wide-eyed, at my Female. She quickly relieves me of
my squirming burden and tosses him onto the other chair, sending him flying
momentarily through the air before he plunks down on the soft cushions, unharmed.
It is amusing to see him fly, to say the least. He lands, invigorated rather
than taking her rebuke to heart, and licks his tail hurriedly in the childish
way he and one of my older brothers, the Black one, share before he begins
rolling around on the chair, having discovered one of our toys behind the
pillow.
I
stay with my Female while she works, my back against her leg, and my silky
black and beautiful tail swishing gracefully through the air. Tails are so
elegant, and they convey so much, too. But my Female and her Male and her
friends all lack tails. What a shame. They could use them for so many things,
like telling someone you are insulted without saying anything, or showing
excitement by shooting your tail straight up in the air. Silent conversation is
an element it seems my Female and her friends have not yet mastered at my
superior level. I imagine they would look ridiculous with tails even if tails
benefit their communication abilities. Mine will still be silkier and more
elegant than theirs if they grew them.
My Female and I often
play a talking game down the hall and have since the early days of my
childhood. I sit on one end of the hall staring at her; meanwhile, she ducks
behind the wall on the opposite side or behind a door, leaving it slightly ajar,
and after a second or two, I see the top of her head poke out from behind the
door. Her eyes glint, and she bares her teeth in her way or calls my name or
says what I think in her language equals a greeting; whichever she chooses, it
signals the beginning of the game, and I reply, speaking the first word I think
of. As she ducks behind the door or wall, I creep closer, keeping close to the
wall and freezing whenever she reemerges; I speak whenever she does, and this
seems to make her happy. It’s our game, and at the end, I get close enough to
tap her and play, which makes me happy. Usually I reach through the tiny space
between the door and the wall and bat at my Female’s shins, protected as I am
by the door for she is too large to squeeze through the space as I am. Sometimes,
though, I signal I don’t want to play by not batting at her, so she bends down
and pets me instead.
Squeezing.
That brings me to another recent development I am NOT thrilled with at all and
that is most certainly not my fault, and I take no responsibility with the
state of things, only I try to communicate my displeasure at this thing which
has happened as often as possible.
My
Female calls me beautiful, but her Male meanly calls me fat (but I think it
stems from his jealousy in that he is not covered in silky, black-and-white fur
and lacks the daintiness and elegance my Female praises me for), but I admit
that I noticed more fur and more…space…around my middle when bathing this
morning, but I do not see this as a negative trait at all, for it gives my
Female more to pet after I flip over onto my back to permit her to rub my belly
(a thing that I adore).
Alas, to my utter
dismay, it seems to my Female that when I ate my feelings and lay around the
house after she moved me because I was lonely and the experience was thoroughly
traumatic, and then she LEFT ME during the days to my whims, and I felt like
doing few enjoyable things and only wanted to hide, unmoving, all day until she
returned—that I apparently had many feelings to eat. When Trip arrived, I
discovered that his food is so much
better than my own, probably because they give all the best food to the
babies and neglect the preteens in favor of the mewling, tiny ones. So, my
Female placed me on a diet, which I learned today means that all food disappears
(Trip’s included) during the day and only appears at night, and I am no longer
allowed to partake of Trip’s food anymore (which I DO NOT approve of in the
least), but at least my Female still gives me treats and tuna when she
sometimes eats it.
I forgive my Female,
though. I know she means well, even if I do not see it exactly that way. She
lets me sit in her lap and help her with the clickey-pads and make squiggles on
the glowing screen, and she spends plenty of time with me alone and together,
we listen to Trip sit outside the bedroom door and cry. We—my Female and I—think
he may have a thing she calls Separation Anxiety, and by shutting him out
temporarily, she shows him that although he cannot see her for a while, she will
always return. She plays with me often, too, and lets me sleep in her soft and
squishy bed (a luxury Trip does not enjoy, to my delight). As far as the bed
goes, I am still her favorite.
I do not smell that
other female of my kind as much as in that first home with my Female; her
traces are fainter and linger only on the oldest toys my Female brought with
her, masked now my mine and Trip’s scents. Part of me wonders, when I smell
that other, lost female from time to time, what became of her and if her
absence is the reason my Female sometimes looks at me with what I believe she
calls sadness on her furless face and why she frantically searches the house
when I forget to answer her or hide for a time. I wonder if that is why my
Female holds me so tightly at times, as though she worries one day I might
disappear, too, and fade with the disappearing scent of that other female of my
kind. In every touch, every pet, every silly thing she says and does, every
game we play, every hug she gives or kiss she plants on my nose or forehead,
and every humming laugh she emits when I do something she calls cute to get her
attention, adopting a rascal of a little brother so I wouldn’t be lonely, (even
placing me on the loathsome diet that she believes serves my best interest)—in
all of that, I know my Female loves me.
Because that look of
joy in her funny-shaped eyes and furless face when my Female returns and hunts
through the house to find, pet, and talk with me—it makes me happy.
Jemma
the black-and-white tuxedo cat lives in Texas with her Female, Abbie, Abbie’s
Male (husband), Ben, and her pesky-but-cute little brother, Trip. When she isn’t
narrating elements of her adventures and relaying them to Abbie to write,
helping Abbie master the clickey-pads, and babysitting Trip, Jemma enjoys
sleeping in her favorite chair, under the beds, or in the middle of the floor
two feet from her plush cat bed, eating, and people-watching from her favorite
window until a loud truck rumbles by. Most
of all, she enjoys living her life of luxury, playing with Trip keeping Abbie company, and receiving
many pets and much attention.
