Cat Tales

Readers have been requesting more stories about my cats lately…or maybe I just wanted to share. Who can blame me, living with such freaks as these? Recently I’ve shared these stories with the wonderful people in the author’s hangout, and I wanted to share them with any readers brave enough to venture forth into a story about my pussies. So here are a few strange tales, and I hope you enjoy them.

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I have three cats. Cosmic Creepers is my oldest cat, a five-year-old black boy cat. He’s a fairly normal cat except that he is hugely obese. I feel bad for him, really, but I can’t help love the teddy bear-like way he acts…which is to say he lays around and doesn’t do much all day. He’s huge. Twenty pounds if he’s an ounce. One odd thing about Cos is his reaction when you touch him right above the tail, or anywhere on the back, really. He appears to need to lick his front leg.

Frankly the boy is so big he can’t really keep himself very clean. He can get his front parts just fine, but he can’t clean his back half. I think that this might be where the front-paw-licking-tick comes in. You touch him somewhere he can’t reach himself, and he feels compelled to lick something, anything, clean something, anything, get himself cleaner, anywhere, any-how. I could be wrong, but that’s just my assumption.

The urge to clean his arm has led to some interesting sights. Sometimes the wonderful lump of a cat will lay on his back and twist around. But, that makes his back tingle, so he’ll flip over as fast as he can to lick his front leg. Unfortunately on his way to lick his front leg he has touched the other side of his back, and so he flips back over to lick the other leg.

Cosmic is the nicest cat by far, in my opinion. He loves to be a pillow, he loves to cuddle, he purrs really loud. Unfortunately he has really long sharp claws, and doesn’t always treat people as gently as he could. I sleep naked, he sleeps next to me, and if something scares him I’m in for a few scratches. One such scratch was on my cheek for three days.

Mogwai is my middle cat, a grayish brownish tabby who, frankly, seems to have gone completely insane. I don’t know if it’s something in here genes, or something that I did to her in her early stages of life, but my cat is completely crazy. She had babies when she was way too young, which was fun for me, and seemed to be baffling for her.

Before Mogwai got pregnant, and keep in mind she was knocked up when she was only four months old, she found a toy that was very, very much to her liking. A stuffed lion small enough for her to carry around by the mane. She licked it, carried it, batted it, chewed it, ripped all the hair out from its head. Some mornings I’d find it in her water dish. Other mornings, more disturbing mornings, it would be right next to my head on my pillow. When she had her kittens she seemed to lose time for the lion, and I thought that the stuffed-animal fetish had ended.

I was wrong.

It’s been over two years since Mogwai’s babies left the nest, and we’ve moved since then. My new apartment has a basement. The basement is filled with boxes. One box was filled with stuffed animals. Mogwai found that box.

Each morning for two weeks I woke up to find another of my stuffed animals had migrated upstairs. Huge stuffed animals, not just little ones. Big stuffed bears, stuffed cats, stuffed Tasmanian-devils. Along with a ton of beanie-babies from my less sensible days. Now they’re everywhere. I keep putting them back downstairs, and she keeps bringing them up. Things as big as she is. Things bigger. Nothing is safe.

Mogwai goes crazy for anything mint or plastic. The best things are the things that are mint flavored plastic. Right now as I speak she is eating a plastic bag that I brought some grapes upstairs in. She chews on plastic, tears at plastic, sits inside plastic bags. She licks plastic until it is soaking wet. She bats at plastic. She loves plastic.

She goes absolutely crazy for minty things. Gum wrappers, for instance. She'll roll around with them, lick them, rub her face against them, bat them around. Toothbrushes she'll chew on. Candy she'll eat.

In my last apartment I had this big green painted sheet hanging on the wall of my boring little hallway. It was tacked up at the top in five or six places, and made a great toy for my felines. Sometimes they'd sit behind it, hiding between the cloth and the wall. You could see the lump, but they thought they were being pretty stealthy (they being the three felines...eight when one had kittens) The cats could actually see through the sheet from the other side (I tried it once) so they would sit and wait for a human to walk by. Bat, bat, bat. You'd walk through the hall and your feet would get patted, sometimes gently and sometimes not so gently. Ambush from below.

Mog thought that it was great fun to climb the sheet and balance her way across the taut top. So, of course she taught the trick to her babies. As they grew older, they climbed higher, and many times I'd walk through the halls and find up to four kittens practically suspended in the air. They ripped the sheet to shreds. Finally the kittens were too big to hold it anymore, and one by one the tacks came out. The kittens were given away, and I thought my sheet problems were over...nope.

One day I was on the computer and I heard the unmistakable sounds of claws climbing the sheet. Then there was a strange ripping sound and a cat-like shriek of surprise. I got up to see what had happened. In theory, Mogwai was climbing up the sheet, preparing to do her trick of walking across the not-so-taut-anymore top of it, when the last tack let go. My cat was sent flying like Tarzan through the hall, and when I found her she was still clinging to the fabric.

The sheet is now folded nicely in a dresser drawer.

Kenna, aka “the bear,” aka “the kenna mog,” aka “lil mog” is an adorable calico. She’s Mogwai’s daughter, thus the Mog-like nicknames. Kenna is the first of my cats to be raised as an indoor/outdoor cats. Being the nervous type I mostly kept my cats inside before her, but from the time she was a baby to the present Kenna has been used to coming and going as she pleased. Spoiled, that’s what it is.

Kenna is the baby of the family, and even though she’s over two-years old she still acts like a baby. Her cries are like that of a little kitten, and she seems to expect everyone to treat her like the youngest. She bounces from one cat to another person, expecting attention lavished on her. But she’s very flighty, this one, and if you grab her she squeals and whines until you put her down and let her run away. She’s always just out of reach, unlike my other two cats who love to cuddle.

Most of the Kenna Mog is white, so she gets dirty very easily. I have a way to decide whether she can go out or not based on the color of her fur. She’ll go out, roll around in the dirt or do whatever it is she does to get so dirty, come in gray, and I won’t let her out again until she’s perfect white again. Somehow it doesn’t take long. I don’t know how much dirt ends up in her stomach every day, but she does get help from Mogwai, who has resigned herself to being a full time mom for the rest of her life.

But the two cats are like sisters as well as like mother and daughter. They’re constantly fighting for attention, both from the humans and from each other. Both girls are very playful, and chase each other around at light speed in the middle of the night. There seems to be more than playful sibling rivalry sometimes…it can get downright dangerous.

Mogwai opens drawers, pulls things out, shreds them, and then closes the drawer. No drawer or cupboard is safe in this house. It’s just what Mogwai does. Open it, play, close it.

One day I heard a crying sound from inside a drawer. I opened it and the little bear jumped out and ran away in a flash of white fur. Forensics helped me figure out what had happened. Mogwai, in one of her playful but destructive moods, opened the drawer to cause trouble inside. Kenna jumped inside the drawer to see what exciting things there were to be seen. The drawer was empty, since the resident humans don’t bother keeping anything inside them anymore. Why should we when nothing’s safe anyhow? So Mogwai, bored with the drawer, slammed it shut. With Kenna Mog still inside.

Who knows if this had been an innocent mistake or a conspiracy for the loss of a family member? Certainly no human knows enough to point a finger, but I think the Kenna Bear knows.

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Alright, so there’s a little story about my cats for you. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope that you’ll read more in the future = )

-Chicklet