When My Female Returns: A Short Story from Jemma the Tuxedo Cat

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.