90% True

Posted By Caulimovirus on May 26, 2008

.: Last night I came home to an empty apartment. I had left Hobbes outside earlier in the day and never brought him in. Our front and back doors lack a cat flap, and Hobbes does not respond to any calls or cues, so the only feasible way to retrieve him is to crack open the door and wait. After propping the door open with a chair, I surfed the internets for an hour, came downstairs to see if he returned, found him lounging on the couch, shut the door, and went to bed.

.: Eight hours later, I woke up, grabbed my towel, and read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one sitting. Periodically throughout the reading I was struck by a noisome smell that I thought originated from the overflowing trashcan in my room. When I finished the book, I emptied the trashcan in the dumpster outside and saw several moldy banana peels slip out along with end of semester papers and candy wrappers. Mystery solved, I thought.

.: I returned to the apartment, ventured into the kitchen which overflowed with upended beer cans and other college debris, and made my late-morning peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The stench still lingered, but I figured after pinpointing the source the problem would correct itself.

.: Nothing suspicious transpired for the next three hours. Nothing unwonted presented itself, no mysteries remained to be solved, and, but for the persisting pestilential odor, there was no reason to think I would be attacked soon by a malevolent feral hell cat from Hell.

.: Reasons to think just that accumulated very quickly. The first (and by itself convincing) reason came from my roommate who, upon entering through the front door, asked, “Cody, why is there another cat in the house?” I immediately descended the stairs with Hobbes close by, and once at the bottom I saw the creature which provoked Diego’s inquiry.

“Uhh,” I said, and the cat promptly took evasive action, meaning it jumped spastically and uncontrollably towards things which could fall over and break. Immediately Diego and I tried to corner the little beast, but its movements proved to be utterly unpredictable. It was less a cat and more an electron: we could tell how fast it was going, but at the cost of not knowing where the hell it was at any particular moment.

.: Diego’s friend Dallas assisted in the capture by wrapping her arms around me from behind and jumping frantically up and down, screaming. Diego meanwhile opened both doors in the house, much the way one rolls down the windows to provide an annoying fly with an escape route. Once I shook Dallas from my person, I grabbed Hobbes and locked him in the bathroom, lest he quarrel with the intruder and get his domesticated ass handed to him.

.: Opening the doors failed to lure the swift servant of Satan from the living room, so we decided to be more direct with our incentives. I found a longular PVC pipe inexplicably hidden behind the loveseat and handed Diego the Louisville slugger I keep between the bookcases. The cat, which by now had emptied its testicular essence over all three couches, was trapped behind the blinds of the main living room windows. Covering the blinds were two smaller flags, American and Colombian, as well as a larger, altogether friendlier Baylor standard. The whole general mishmash of cat-flags-windows-blinds made an easily accessible, if delicate, target for our pipe and bat.

.: Diego lunged at the mishmash with all the grace of an overpunched boxer. The cat was already scurrying up the window repeatedly only to fall victim to gravity every time and slide back toward the sill — now there was another variable for it to consider, irritating it further. Diego repeated his thrust, this time breaking the window with the gentlest of blows. A cat-sized hole appeared, providing a timely if not safe escape route for the mangy little bastard to leap through.

.: Throughout the fourteen hour ordeal, Martin (everyone deserves a respectable name, devil werecats included) hissed and ran and pissed at and from and on everybody and everyone and everything. Now the downstairs smells like rotten bread, the blinds are all bent to hell, the flags are riddled with claw marks, the other cat whines because we won’t let him outside anymore, and we can’t turn on the air conditioning because the intake filter is situated right by the most offensive of all catness deposits.

.: Sammy and Diego both have other places to stay tonight (just one of the many perks of having lady friends), but I’m condemned to sleep in this temporary litter box for the foreseeable future. When we run out of incense, I suppose we’ll have to find the precise locations of the cat smell, but I’ve no idea how to remove them. Any suggestions?

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: