More Gross Stuff That Happened To Me

Okay, so um... this happened yesterday:

At least, I think it was yesterday. I mean, shoot, I hope it was just yesterday. I would sure hate to think I slept under that mess for a night or two. Or twelve.

It's cat puke, in case you haven't already figured that part out already (or in case you were thinking I was still in college), and it's all over (and I do mean allllll over) my dry-clean only -- Ralph Lauren, I might add -- down comforter. (It was a gift.)

This happened on a Friday night, and the dry cleaner that does down comforters is all the way in Quincy, which isn't too-too far (I did, for example, just drive roughly that distance in order to purchase my special brand of IPA) but it's right next door to where I park the car for work, so it doesn't make any sense for me to go all the way over there today, when I know damn well they don't actually do the cleaning on the premises and I highly doubt they'll be sending it out till Monday anyway. So the comforter, in that picture as in real life, is on the porch for now, while I decide whether I'm going to bring it in before they close or leave it there and look at it for a while and -- oh, it's just a big old nasty mess.

Suffice to say the cat got yelled at really bad last night, and maybe he got stomp-chased around the house with a cat-puke stained down comforter, and perhaps he was warned to just not be where anyone was going to lays eyes on him for a while.

It's possible that all these things were done to him. By someone. But I'm not saying who.

And then, when that certain Someone told her One Friend what had happened -- told her about the stomping and the comforter and all the shouting -- One Friend might have said "Poor kitty doesn't feel good!"

And when Johnny heard what happened, from I don't know who, he might have said "Could it maybe have something to do with the flea medicine making them sick?"

And then Someone -- I'm not saying who -- felt really, really, bad.

Now, because of the extent of the mess created, I assumed it was Dodo who threw up. See, he's had a bit of a drinking problem lately. He'd always been a bit of an emotional eater but, what with the diet he's been on for the past couple months, his food dish is empty these days more often than it's full. So when he goes now to drown his sorrows (or relieve his boredom, or redirect his anxiety, or any of the thousand other things that folks like him (and, not by any stretch of the imagination, me) try to get food to do) he's been turning to the water dish to fill his empty soul.

Poor kitty. Doesn't feel good. And Some mean Body yelled at him.

Anyway, I cried a little bit for the terrible person that I've turned out to be (I mean, Somebody; I cried for the terribly humanity of Someone), and then I opened up a can of Starkist Chunk Light so as to spread a little Tuna Juicy Love. I put his wee glass dish under the kitchen table where he always gets his juice, and then I ... well... Then I could not seem to find Girl Cat to give her hers.

And I couldn't find her.

And I couldn't find her.

I looked in the attic, in the basement, under all the beds and chairs. I looked on the porch, in the laundry room, even out under the front-door stairs. I called Johnny and asked if he had left the doors open at all today. He said he hadn't. I did not believe him (because I am a Terrible Human), but I decided not to pick a fight. Then I looked in all those spots again. With a flashlight, this time.

And I couldn't find her.

So I gave a half-hearted search of the dark spider-yard, then walked around the house moaning and crying and waving a flashlight at every dark corner. Behind doors, under dressers, up against cases of empty bottles and cans. And I thought to myself: so this is how it ends. Fourteen years, three apartments (five, if you count when they stayed with my brother and my sister when Johnny and I were gallavanting off in Europe). plus the AssVac. And now one unacknowledged open door... and poof.

This isn't the first time I've been through this. Once, when they were three years old, I threw the boy away. He'd crawled into an empty box, and I dragged him right out with the trash. This was when I lived in the South End of Boston, and this was in February, but when I noticed him missing and remembered about the box and ran outside in my underpants, he was still there. Curled up at the bottom of the box and sleeping, like the idiot he was then and still is. I cried and laughed when I found him, and to this day shudder when I think about the fate he would have suffered in the morning.

He's pulled that sort of shit a few more times over the years, but sister's really not a run-awayer. Leave a door open, she tends to shrink back to the opposite wall and scamper. When he escapes, he always turns up behind the shurbs or under the porch or something, but if she got out and something spooked her -- which something surely would have in the hours since I last knew for sure that she was here -- then she'd be gone.

Or ... what if she was here? What if she was here, and she was the one that's sick, and she had crawled into some small dark corner to feel sorry for herself? Or to simply (gulp) just up and die?

"Sister! Oh, Sister! I need you to show your face! Mommy needs to know that you're okay!" I'm not embarrassed to admit it, I was really crying now. I started overturning mop buckets and picking up old pillows. I was looking in the pot cupboards and opening the showers. Finally, in desperation, I embarked upon the full-house sweep again.

And then I found her.

Under the bed in the guest bedroom, the very first place that I'd looked. And the sixth, and the fourteenth, and the twenty-seventh, and the seventy-third. There is no way I could have missed her there all those many times I looked, which means she'd been one step ahead of me the whole entire fucking time. I didn't care. I was so happy to see her that all by myself -- with my bad back and my tennis-elbow -- I shoved the king-sized bed out from the wall so I could get at her to give her a I'm-so-glad-that-you're-still-here-with-me squeeze. But when I moved the bed she ran, scared to death, out of the guest room, through the dining and living rooms, and out onto the porch.

Well, at least it's an enclosed porch. And the outside door was closed.

Johnny got home about twenty minutes later. He found me snuggling with the boy cat on the bed. I asked him if he'd go fetch Sister for me, and he did. He came back in the bedroom holding her awkwardly in his arms, her looking pissed off at everything in the universe but him. After a minute of examination we determined she was fine, physically speaking. Though she refused to eat her tuna-juice out of pure spite.

So anyway, I washed the sheets of cat puke, but I did not entirely make up the total bed. It was late, I was lazy, so I just put the bottom sheet on and slept covered in a lightweight blanket -- which, to be perfectly honest, is probably how it will stay till the down comforter gets back from the dry cleaners.

And then, this afternoon, there was a little note left for me on the naked bottom sheet from sister:

Then, in case I hadn't got the message, she left a little PS on my pillow:

Need a close-up? Okay, I'll show you:

Fog!

I know these are her footprints because she's the only one who walks across the headboard. I still do think it was him what sicked all over, and I believe she was just hiding (and footprinting) because she's pissed-off that I yelled. Which is funny, because she loves to yell at him -- and hit him, which I expressly didn't do.

Him, though? He doesn't care.

Whuh? Wud'd I do? Wha happened?

See?