Tonight was supposed to be a quiet night after woork. It’s been sweltering at the parks, and just <extended sudder of tension and frustration>. Ah, much better.
So I get home, hit the shower, check the internet, follow up on some threads and start a virus scan. So far so good. I hit the shower and get the day’s crud off of me. So far, very good.
I grab a book off the shelf for some light reading (H.P. Lovecraft, some collected stories), lie down on the bed and read while I’m waiting for the scan to finish and I can go to bed. So far, pretty good. Nice and relaxed, local NPR station, life is good.
Mud jumps on the bed. Yup, this one was Mud, the ‘normal’ cat of all her personalities. So she crawls onto my chest, settles in to an almost meatloaf position (front paws are semi-tucked under her, but not fully) and changes to “PurrMonster” (purrs are radiating through me, almost as good as a deep tissue massage, and much cheaper). I start scratching her under the chin, her eyes close to slits and she stretches so I can reach all around her neck. The purring becomes more resonant and life is now relaxed and contented.
Now I know my cat(s). I can tell when she (my only cat, by the way) becomes a totally different cat: her face contorts, the ears go to a different angle, the voice changes, the body stiffens or melts, all that stuff. And I recognize Mud from PurrMonster, from HyperKitty, from Your Majesty, from all of the others. After seven or so years together, I know her and all her quirks.
So I’m scratching her, and she’s letting me, when suddenly her body stiffens and twitches, and her eyes go, for want of a better word, ‘weird’: kinda screws up one eye and opened the other really wide, and I’m thinking to myself, I’ve never seen her do this before, and oh gawd she is laying on me and she is having an epileptic spasm** and do I throw her off me, or leave her on the bed, and shit, what if she has an accident, what is the number for the emergency vet and…"
She sneezes. On me. Not one of those cutesy ha-[sup]chee[/sup] adorable sneezes. Nope, if she had a ball bearing in her nose, this sneeze could have sent it right through a 2 inch piece of solid lead. The sneeze was in conjunction with the equivalent amount of moisture we OUGHT to be receiving here in sunny, dry, no-rain-in-weeks Florida, as well as a HAHTHBBPBTHBFFTHBTHT.
Cat sneeze.
On my face, my pillow, my book. Ick.
Oh, and not just once. Three times in succession. Once would have been bad enough, two was worse and three times was just adding insult to injury.
Did I mention the injury (slight)?
Remember I said she was laying on my chest in a semi-meatloaf position? Paws not quite tucked under? Seems she’s been quite busy with her sisal board in sharpening those talons up, in case any mutant evil dust bunnies decided to go on the rampage throughout the house, and she would be well prepared for all out paw-to-mutant-evil-dust-bunny combat. In retrospect, I can understand that flexing the claws is a reflex action, but trust me, the ‘twins’ did NOT like that one little bit. And neither did I, since the ‘twins’ and I are well-attached.
So here I was, covered in cat spit, nail marks in the twins (no bleeding, but it took awhile for me to detach her, since the claws her snagged in my ratty favorite nightshirt), and many, MANY words are going through my mind, including, ‘shower’ and ‘right now’.
And PurrMonster was reverberating again, eyes closed, as if nothing happened.
So I am now nice and clean again, scrubbed my hair and face, rewashed my face with rubbing alcohol, wiped off the book, stripped the bed and the pillow cases and tossed them in the laundry. And I look over after writing this, and she is now curled up against the pillow, warming the bed for me, her eyes closed, and dreaming cat dreams. Or plotting her next action.
Just thought I’d share. She did.
** which I have never seen a cat have before, but all this is running through my brain in a millisecond.
