My Life in a Cat House by Gwen Cooper

Author:Gwen Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2018-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

THEM! A Story in Five Parts

1. THE BOWL BOY

Laurence and I uncovered an infestation of moths in our closets and drawers a few weeks ago. It was the kind of thing I thought only happened to people in sitcoms and movies—having never personally known anyone with a moth-ridden house in real life. Turns out, it does happen in real life. When I first started finding holes in the cashmere sweaters I was prepping for summer storage, I blamed the cats—Fanny, in particular, who dearly loves sleeping on articles of my clothing, especially when that clothing is made of cashmere or angora (Fanny having very posh tastes). I’ve occasionally observed her remorselessly “making biscuits” on said clothing—her claws at full extension—preparatory to lying down. It seemed like a plausible theory.

But when I then found identical holes in T-shirts, sweatshirts, silk blouses, pajamas, socks, workout togs, and all manner of other clothing that neither Fanny nor Clayton had access to, I began to doubt the cats’ guilt. And when I finally noticed two teeny-tiny moths, perched upside down on the bedroom ceiling above my head, I knew I’d found my culprits.

Tearfully, I consigned a large pile of expensive cashmere sweaters—accumulated over some fifteen years—to the trash, the holes in them so numerous that no amount of clever crocheting could have salvaged them. I walked from the bedroom closet to Laurence’s home office, right next door to our bedroom, cradling in my arms the moth-eaten corpse of a much-beloved cranberry cowl-neck as tenderly as if it were the bullet-riddled body of a comrade fallen in battle. Throwing it across the desk where Laurence was working, I informed him of the moth-y new development in our lives. “We must kill them,” I announced. My voice quavered with the intensity of my desire for vengeance, and I struck my fist on Laurence’s desk for dramatic emphasis. “We must kill them with fire!”

The only ones who seemed pleased at this turn of events were the cats. My manic tear through our closets and drawers, after I’d discovered the first moth holes, had sent airborne perhaps another half-dozen moths who’d been disturbed from the cool, dark comfort of their hiding places. Small as they were, their frantic, looping cartwheels in the air around us made the catching of them a delightfully tantalizing prospect for Fanny and Clayton.

Poor, stocky Clayton, who has only one hind leg, is a mediocre jumper at best, and most of the moths evaded him easily enough. But his littermate, Fanny—slender and leanly muscled—is our resident jock. Able to leap from a starting point on the ground to the height of my hairline, with as much dazzling speed as if she were a black-furred bolt of lightning, Fanny was in her element as she made short work of one moth after another.

It’s possible that Fanny is the actual sweetest cat in the world—a devoted lover who coos and cuddles and looks at me with her whole heart in her round, golden eyes—but she is, conversely, also the most murderous cat I’ve ever lived with.

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