Warning: please take the following content with a grain of salt. I am not a cat psychologist, I do not own a cat, I’ve hardly even petted a cat because cats are scary, man. They’ll scratch my eyes out if I’m less than five meters away from them. This is a fact. You have been warned.
The first thing that the cats learn at Vimana Pet Shop is to get as high as kittily possible at all times to avoid that dirty, dangerous, dreadful dog Dodge. (“He was barking and howling and-and-and he wanted to BEFRIEND me! It was TERRIBLE!” Merrooow whimpers to Mroop, whiskers atremble. “There, there.”) This lesson is so deeply ingrained in their psyches that even once they leave Vimana and the danger of Dodge, their first (and second, and third, and fiftieth) instinct is still to seek out the high point.
Thus, when that adorable ball of puff, Miaw, is taken home by Lizzie late one night, cheeks cherry red and squeals falling out of her mouth at superhuman rate, the first thing she does is scope out the high roads.
Lizzie’s home is large, shiny, and white, with modern, abstract lines and lovely, hanging greenery. The walls are the most absurd shape, rounded like the fishbowl that the Stinky Food Man never lets the cats touch. The surfaces, from the grand piano to the table to the walls, are all sleek and glossy. Hanging from the ceiling and growing out of sleek tubs are plants, green and leafy and blue and red.
From a mere glance, Miaw can already plot fifteen separate routes to reach the ceiling: ten via those dangling vines, four by climbing up the wall, and a final one onto the chandelier.
Miaw is most apurredly in love.
“Aaaw! She’s purring! Mummy, isn’t she adorable!?!” Lizzie squeals as she cathandles Miaw out of her cage and squeezes her until she can’t breathe. “I’m going to call her Captain Fluffy McPoofun!”
Miaw yowls with indignation. “You shall not!”
Lizzie coos. “Ooh, you like that name, don’t you, Captain Fluffy McPoofun? Mmhm I do! Ooh, good kitty kitty!”
Miaw bats her paw at Lizzie’s nose but, having long been declawed, such an action is less than useless. Lizzie squeals yet again, squeezing Miaw even tighter, and bounces out the foyer and up the stairs into her incredibly pink room. Miaw debates the merits of biting the girl but, well, humans taste nasty. Yrowl bit the Stinky Food Man once and couldn’t get the taste out for a week. But then, maybe this human is a different species from the Stinky Food Man? She’s so much more high-pitched, and besides, she doesn’t stink.
By the time Miaw finishes her contemplation of species, Lizzie has dropped her on the magenta bedspread and is standing, arms akimbo, before Miaw. “Now, Captain Fluffy McPoofun. I only just got Mummy and Daddy to let me have a kitty, so you better be good for me, okay? Otherwise, Mummy might take you away and we don’t want that, do we, Captain Fluffy McPoofun? Now, you be good and stay there. I need to brush my teeth and I’ll be right back! Buh-bye, mwah mwah mwah!” She drops sloppy wet kisses all over Miaw’s head and disappears into the adjoining bathroom.
Miaw blinks at the whirlwind that is Lizzie. What just—what? How can any being have so much energy? Miaw shakes herself with a full-body tremble. No matter. She needs to go up, and what better time for that is there than now? She scrambles off the bed and hightails it out of the room.
Well, tries to. Just as she reaches the rose-pink door, the bathroom door slams open, and Lizzie skids back inside. “Captain Fluffy McPoofun! Aaw, you want to explore the house, don’t you? We need to sleep now, but we’ll do it tomorrow, okay? I promise!” So saying, she drags Miaw back to the bed by the tail, yowling all the way, and squeezes her tight. She doesn’t let go when her parents come in to put her to sleep, she doesn’t let go when the lights go out, and she never once lets go the entire night.
By morning, Miaw is sleep-deprived, grumpy, and wondering how she hasn’t suffocated yet. Miaw spent half the night tangled in the blankets, and the other half tangled in the pillowcase. Not to mention, she’s also hungry.
The rest of her day doesn’t go any better. First, Lizzie gives her a big, ugly bowl that smells all—brace yourself—orangey, full of rocky food that Lizzie expects her to eat, and when Miaw knocks the bowl over as any self-respecting cat would, she gets upset. Then, Lizzie drags Miaw outside, with all the dirt and mud and dust that gets in her eyes and it’ll take hours to get clean again. And then Lizzie invites five more grubby loud squealing humans over, and they get their grubby squealing hands all over her lovely clean fur that she’d only just cleaned, and gosh, Miaw does not have the patience for this today. (Not that she ever does, but especially not today.)
She doesn’t manage to escape Lizzie’s grasp even once the whole day, making her even grouchier. Cats are not meant to be on the ground. Miaw hisses in displeasure. You would think even the stupidest person would know, but noooo, somehow she just has to get a human even stupider than the stupidest.
Lizzie just smiles down at Miaw. “Oh, you are so adorbs, Captain Fluffy McPoofun! I love you so much!”
Miaw hisses some more. Lizzie just squeezes Miaw tighter.
It takes a week of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days before Lizzie finally leaves Miaw alone for more than ten minutes. “Captain Fluffy McPoofun, I’ve got a surprise for you. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, you’ll love it!”
With that, she dumps Miaw on her bed, adjusts the pink bow on Miaw’s head, and rushes off. Miaw is so shocked, she stares after Lizzie for a minute before her brain reboots and she starts moving.
Fourteen.
She skids out of the room and down the hall, feet scrabbling for friction when she accidentally overshoots past the stairs.
Thirteen.
OW OW OW. She yowls—she’s really been doing an awful lot of that ever since Lizzie brought her home—as she misjudges her balance and rams into the wall.
Twelve.
She readjusts herself and glances around to make sure no one saw her embarrassing mistake. Seeing no one around, she coughs up a hairball, grooms her paw, and pads back towards the stairs. Then, she scrambles up the baluster and slides down the banister.
Eleven.
OW OW yet again OW. She shoots off the end of the banister, flies into the bottom of the chandelier, and falls onto the ground before she can hold onto the chandelier. She’s not usually this clumsy. It’s all that girl’s fault, Miaw growls bitterly. It’s all because Lizzie’s been watching Miaw so much that she can’t practice.
Ten.
Hissing and growling, Miaw stumbles up the stairs to try again.
Nine.
WEEEEEEAAAAAAAGHHHHH! Miaw shoots off the end of the banister, flies into the bottom of the chandelier, and smashes onto the ground. Miaw hisses and turns an ominous glare on the stairs.
Eight.
Since when is this staircase so long?
Seven.
Gah! Miaw flips herself up onto the top step and collapses. Though she’s too tired to even hiss, her displeasure is still crystal clear.
Six.
Ready, set—MRRAOWP! She accidentally starts sliding before she manages to settle herself on the banister properly, ending up sliding backward towards her doom. She shoots off the end of the banister, flies into the bottom of the chandelier, and—not again!—smashes onto the ground. What now? Miaw looks around desperately, eyes wild. She hasn’t the time to try the banister again.
Five.
Of course: the piano!
Four.
She climbs onto the bench, smashes onto the piano keys, and wishes woefully for claws as she attempts to climb the too-smooth surface.
Three.
She’s on the piano lid. She can do this, she tries to motivate herself. She won premium nap time by the window in the Purrkour Championships back at Vimeowna, there’s no one better at this than she!
Two.
She runs up the lid’s slippery slope and leaps.
One.
Just as Miaw reaches the top of her jump, Lizzie rushes into the room, squealing, “Ooh Captain Fluffy McPoofun! I brought cat toys!” Miaw stares down at Lizzie, eyes wide, as she zooms straight over her head and lands, safe and snug, in the chandelier.
Zero.
“Cap? Captain Fluffy McPoofun?! MUMMY! CAPTAIN FLUFFY MCPOOFUN IS GONE!”
Miaw purrs contentedly from atop the chandelier and licks her paw.
Lizzie and her parents spend the next two hours searching for “Captain Fluffy McPoofun,” looking under couches and in the garden and even in the kitchen oven, never once thinking to look up. (For it is a truth universally understood but not much acknowledged that humans never, ever look up. It is a strange phenomenon that possesses humans even when there are plants dangling from the ceiling that, by all rights, should attract one’s attention upwards.)
That night, once Lizzie has gone to bed, her parents gather under the chandelier and plot in hushed whispers. “I told you she wasn’t ready for a pet,” Mummy sniffs.
Daddy frowns. “But she’s so upset. And she was taking care of the cat so well before now—it’s not her fault it ran away.”
“Well, what do you suggest—we buy her a new cat?”
“Yes! Fantastic idea!”
“No! I was joking!”
Daddy only grows more enamored with the idea. “When I was a kid and my goldfish kept dying—“
“Why do you always bring up your goldfish—“
“My parents would buy me a new one and I never even knew it died!”
“I don’t want to hear about your goldfish, you proposed to me with a goldfish, why can’t we have a conversation without goldfish?!”
“If they could do that with my goldfish, why can’t we do it for Captain Fluffball?”
“Because cats aren’t goldfish!”
“So?”
“So they’re expensive! So if we buy fifty cats the way your parents bought fifty goldfish, we’ll be bankrupt!”
“Come now, darling. Don’t exaggerate, we won’t go bankrupt. Look, we’ll keep the next one in the cage when Lizzie’s not playing with it and it won’t even be able to run away! It’s not as if we’ll need to buy so many cats.”
Oh, what famous last words.
The next cat, Merrooow, manages to escape Lizzie and join Miaw on the chandelier in three weeks, Mroop joins them in another five, Yrowl in just two. By the time Lizzie leaves home for college, there are 42 white cats seated on the chandelier, in the various plant boxes in the ceiling, and hanging from the vines, and her parents are absolutely certain there’s a cat burglar in the neighborhood.
Miaw licks her paw.
A/N: I imagine the house looks much like the following image.
Highly comical
I agree!