Fish and Shiz

Baby cat is cute. She has an adorable face, her little waddle makes me smile, and I love the little moments at night when she nuzzles in my lap and falls asleep as I play the ukulele and sing.

We have our moments, like any rag-tag family. Maybe I have a series of scratches on both lower legs from her leaping attempts from the floor to the couch; maybe I tend to step on her more than I pet her; perhaps her meowing makes me think of dangerous, sick medical procedures in which she loses her entire throat area. But I like Cat. She makes things less lonely, and she's an extra being to talk to other than the squirming cockroaches in their last breath after being poisoned with pesticide.

But this weekend, Cat had problems. My lovely, wonderful, best friend Kaitlin--who, along with me, was trying her best to not kill Cat due to the excessive meowing--decided to share some of her suspicious-looking fish and chips to the poor, meowing baby (who apparently was not in the mood for milk and canned tuna.) So when Cat (and yes, I just call her that now. 'Line is kind of an official name, I suppose, but Cat is just much easier. And she responds to it.) was finished devouring greasy, fried fish and limp-from-oil fries, I volunteered her for a haetus into her own bedroom. My friends and I proceeded to get ready for another (and, thank goodness, final) Halloween party of the year, and 3-ish hours later, we realized Cat hadn't made a peep since we shut her in the room. I opened the door, to which she normally wriggles through at the opening of 2 inches, but there was baby cat, laying in the middle of the room. Suddenly a terrible smell engulfed my very nose fibers, baby Cat sauntered out, and I shut the door before my dinner came up.

Oh. My GOD, I said. That room smells awful! Cat slowly walked to her food bowl, stared at it half-heartedly, and then plopped in the middle of the doorway, front paws straight out and back legs straight back. It was the most pitiful kitten I'd ever seen in my life. Her usual pot-belly had shrunk to a normal size, and she was completely silent.

Kaitlin? I said. Yeah. How much food did you give Cat? I dunno, quite a bit, I guess. Why? I think she's dying. Kaitlin opened the bedroom door and, likewise, shut it quickly. Oh my God, she said. That smells disgusting. I think she is dying. (Kaitlin is also the most guilt-ridden person I've ever met, so random bouts of apologies for my potentially dead kitten came up over the next few hours into the night So as we were getting ourselves dressed up and costumey, I kept finding piles of...waste in random parts of my house. While we distractedly got dressed, Cat would wander into my bedroom, where she made about 4 piles of poo or vomit (I couldn't tell, but it looked like chunky gravy). I gathered the last of my tissues, wiped up the grody piles, nearly threw up, then sprayed my floor with bleach and mopped it with more disinfectant.

I ignored Cat's bedroom the rest of the night, but decided that Sunday morning would be dedicated to cleaning up the mess before I went to Pangai Motu, our "Palangi" place for sanity, where we take a boat to a small, nearby island and wear real swimsuits. I mopped Cat's room twice on Sunday, then once yesterday, and have left the windows open to get air circulating. It smells like fishy poo and Cat will have to get a bath soon, because snuggling requires me to stop breathing for seconds at a time.

But I suppose this is a growing experience for me. I've never taken care of another being before (my childhood pets were more like farm animals, which my parents usually took care of since I always lost interest or merely forgot), and since I have no other choice (leaving Cat outside is absolutely not an option, since a rooster could probably peck her to death in 5 seconds, and she'd be a daytime snack for a dog), she stays inside. Smelly poo and all.