Cat-Brides of Dracula
Now.
Let me tell you about Mathurin.
I got him on a trip to Georgia when I was just barely fourteen. The friend I'd gone to see met me in the Burger King, and produced a squirming, fuzzy bundle from beneath her striped shirt.
She knew I loved cats, see, and knew I loved black cats even better.
Let me tell you, I have seen some ugly kittens. He not only took the cake, he took a swan-dive face-planted into it. His eyes were too big for his head, his head was too big for his neck, which was too small for his head or his body. His legs were too long, his feet too big, his stomach too fat, his tail all the wrong length. His short, rough fur couldn't decide whether it wanted to stand straight up or like greasily flat. He was all claws and eyeballs. Oh, and fangs. He still had his milk teeth, but by golly, you could see those nippers even when his mouth was closed.
Naturally, I fell in love. Mother quite generously allowed me to take him home. On the long drive back, I listened to King Diamond's The Eye a lot. It speaks of Father Mathurin Picard, a deranged priest who tormented nuns and held Satanic rites at the convent of Louviers in the 1630's.
The cat, all things considered, looked quite a bit like a bloodsucking little bat. And his coat of sooty black, relieved only by a few white hairs at the throat, reminded me of a priest's collar.
A name was born.
The disturbing part is that he lived up to it, killing anything and everything he could get his claws into. He promptly adapted to life at our house, with our backyard full of devilishly succulent, tempting birds. In retrospect, I probably should not have praised him when he hunted them.
One day, I returned home from school only to find a plastic bag on the front porch. "What's in there," I asked, vaguely apprehensive.
"Take a look," my mother sniffed. "I found it on the front porch this morning, and thought you should see it. Really."
So I peeled the plastic back and saw the perfect carcass of a mourning dove lying there. I removed it, only to exclaim in horror. Mathurin had bitten the right side of the head off neat as you please, and then licked the inside of the skull sparkling clean.
This is one of my top ten favorite moments ever in my history of keeping cats, right up there with the time Chester shit on someone I didn't like, and the time Twindle brought me a dead mole for my birthday. I think it was topped by Sam beating the shit out of the Dobermans from down the street, but since I don't remember that event (I was only two at the time), I'll just give Matt the gold star for feline high-larity.
Shortly after this, my father began finding dead squirrels in the backyard. Squirrels whose bodies ended in a gnawed little twist of flesh at the neck. Mathurin was promptly dubbed "The Eater of Heads." When Sargon and I saw the movie The Relic, featuring a brain-eating monster, we were both thoroughly amused.
Mathurin never quailed, if you'll pardon the pun, at taking larger prey. He once felled an adult crow, and was a decent rabbit-hunter as well.
Yet for all this, he was an absurdly friendly cat. Pet him, he'd purr. And not only that, he'd drool, like a goddamn faucet. If he was standing on the hood of a car, you could hear it hitting the metal: dripDRIPdripDRIPdripDRIPdripDRIP. A long bout of petting could literally dehydrate him, if you could stand the slimy hands long enough.
This entertaining feature led me on one occasion to pick up the madly salivating cat and thrust him at my gay friend with a grin. "Fondle my drooling pussy!" I exclaimed.
Ah, fun with pets.
The shenanigans didn't stop there. In the course of a fight with a possum, Mathurin acquired a hideous seeping wound on his ass. An abscess formed and burst, leaving a horrific two-holed crater immediately next to his butt. Being a cat, he would often thrust his ass into your face. This didn't stop with the disfiguring wound, oh no. He'd back right up, closer and closer, leading us to recoil from the Lovecraftian horror with exclamations of disgust. "IA! IA! The three-lobed, burning EYE!"
(We were a weird household, to get Cthulhu mythos stories as bedtime fare.)
Medicating the wound was simple as pie. Once a day, I held him down and poured hydrogen peroxide on it. Then I would release him, whereupon he would tear around the house like one of those little boats propelled by vinegar and baking soda. A spotty trail of foam followed him from room to room. I still call him "Buttfoam." Not original, but, hey, nicknames don't have to be original to be fond touchstones of some common experience. Plus, it's fun to say. Try it now.
Anway, when I say that we have a new cat, that is the cat I mean. And, boy, do the other cats resent it. A couple of days after we brought him in, the Horror of the situation had set in. I awoke to pitiful sobbing from the three cat wenches, who are not allowed into the bedroom while I am trying to sleep. I opened the door, only to have them flood across me in a hairy tide. All three of them, Fish, Tazendra, and Sif, sharing the bed. History was made that morning, as they all lay within arm's reach of me, and claw's reach of each other.
Every time the wind blew or molecules shifted outside the room, one or more pairs of fuzzy ears would turn, yellow eyes would rake the hallway, searching for some sign of He Who Shall Not Be Named. They hate him. Oh my God, they hate him.
I got up to go to the bathroom. I'm in there, doing my thing, and I hear a pitiful ". . . miu . . ." from outside the curtain. Brushing it aside, I see all three cats sitting in a line, staring fixedly into the bathroom, just waiting for me to come out. They're terrified. They can't be alone with him, or he will kill them and lick out their brains.
All that day and the next they followed me around like sad little ghosts. I was not cat-free for more than twenty minutes all day. They just took turns being pathetic.
Now they've adjusted to the horror enough to have screaming catfights at the tops of their lungs. And while the other three have not an eighth of a Siamese among them, Mathurin is easily a quarter because he is one of the loudest cats I have ever had. They're also feeling spry enough to break their litter training in new and acrobatic places, such as behind the entertainment center, where we have to resort to tool use, like apes fishing about in a termite mound, to retrieve the mess, because the cabinet itself weighs ten thousand pounds and is directly connected to the gravitational field of the earth, and therefore cannot be shifted so much as an inch.
Matt's doing better. He's very old, and he's a little wobbly on his feet. I don't know if that's age, or if he's not been eating enough. It's hard to get him to eat, even when I stay and guard him from the other cats. He has fleas, and he's really thin. I don't know how much longer I'll have with him.
He's a good cat. A really good cat. And I owe props to my sister. I had no idea, but my parents were just going to have him put down without telling me. She was the one who insisted they tell me. So I really had no right to say anything mean about her. She actually saved his hairy, black life a little bit longer.
I'll get pictures when he comes out enough to get a good one. Black cats are very hard to photograph, because they suck up all available light.
*yawn*
I think that's all the babbling I have in me for now.
Let me tell you about Mathurin.
I got him on a trip to Georgia when I was just barely fourteen. The friend I'd gone to see met me in the Burger King, and produced a squirming, fuzzy bundle from beneath her striped shirt.
She knew I loved cats, see, and knew I loved black cats even better.
Let me tell you, I have seen some ugly kittens. He not only took the cake, he took a swan-dive face-planted into it. His eyes were too big for his head, his head was too big for his neck, which was too small for his head or his body. His legs were too long, his feet too big, his stomach too fat, his tail all the wrong length. His short, rough fur couldn't decide whether it wanted to stand straight up or like greasily flat. He was all claws and eyeballs. Oh, and fangs. He still had his milk teeth, but by golly, you could see those nippers even when his mouth was closed.
Naturally, I fell in love. Mother quite generously allowed me to take him home. On the long drive back, I listened to King Diamond's The Eye a lot. It speaks of Father Mathurin Picard, a deranged priest who tormented nuns and held Satanic rites at the convent of Louviers in the 1630's.
The cat, all things considered, looked quite a bit like a bloodsucking little bat. And his coat of sooty black, relieved only by a few white hairs at the throat, reminded me of a priest's collar.
A name was born.
The disturbing part is that he lived up to it, killing anything and everything he could get his claws into. He promptly adapted to life at our house, with our backyard full of devilishly succulent, tempting birds. In retrospect, I probably should not have praised him when he hunted them.
One day, I returned home from school only to find a plastic bag on the front porch. "What's in there," I asked, vaguely apprehensive.
"Take a look," my mother sniffed. "I found it on the front porch this morning, and thought you should see it. Really."
So I peeled the plastic back and saw the perfect carcass of a mourning dove lying there. I removed it, only to exclaim in horror. Mathurin had bitten the right side of the head off neat as you please, and then licked the inside of the skull sparkling clean.
This is one of my top ten favorite moments ever in my history of keeping cats, right up there with the time Chester shit on someone I didn't like, and the time Twindle brought me a dead mole for my birthday. I think it was topped by Sam beating the shit out of the Dobermans from down the street, but since I don't remember that event (I was only two at the time), I'll just give Matt the gold star for feline high-larity.
Shortly after this, my father began finding dead squirrels in the backyard. Squirrels whose bodies ended in a gnawed little twist of flesh at the neck. Mathurin was promptly dubbed "The Eater of Heads." When Sargon and I saw the movie The Relic, featuring a brain-eating monster, we were both thoroughly amused.
Mathurin never quailed, if you'll pardon the pun, at taking larger prey. He once felled an adult crow, and was a decent rabbit-hunter as well.
Yet for all this, he was an absurdly friendly cat. Pet him, he'd purr. And not only that, he'd drool, like a goddamn faucet. If he was standing on the hood of a car, you could hear it hitting the metal: dripDRIPdripDRIPdripDRIPdripDRIP. A long bout of petting could literally dehydrate him, if you could stand the slimy hands long enough.
This entertaining feature led me on one occasion to pick up the madly salivating cat and thrust him at my gay friend with a grin. "Fondle my drooling pussy!" I exclaimed.
Ah, fun with pets.
The shenanigans didn't stop there. In the course of a fight with a possum, Mathurin acquired a hideous seeping wound on his ass. An abscess formed and burst, leaving a horrific two-holed crater immediately next to his butt. Being a cat, he would often thrust his ass into your face. This didn't stop with the disfiguring wound, oh no. He'd back right up, closer and closer, leading us to recoil from the Lovecraftian horror with exclamations of disgust. "IA! IA! The three-lobed, burning EYE!"
(We were a weird household, to get Cthulhu mythos stories as bedtime fare.)
Medicating the wound was simple as pie. Once a day, I held him down and poured hydrogen peroxide on it. Then I would release him, whereupon he would tear around the house like one of those little boats propelled by vinegar and baking soda. A spotty trail of foam followed him from room to room. I still call him "Buttfoam." Not original, but, hey, nicknames don't have to be original to be fond touchstones of some common experience. Plus, it's fun to say. Try it now.
Anway, when I say that we have a new cat, that is the cat I mean. And, boy, do the other cats resent it. A couple of days after we brought him in, the Horror of the situation had set in. I awoke to pitiful sobbing from the three cat wenches, who are not allowed into the bedroom while I am trying to sleep. I opened the door, only to have them flood across me in a hairy tide. All three of them, Fish, Tazendra, and Sif, sharing the bed. History was made that morning, as they all lay within arm's reach of me, and claw's reach of each other.
Every time the wind blew or molecules shifted outside the room, one or more pairs of fuzzy ears would turn, yellow eyes would rake the hallway, searching for some sign of He Who Shall Not Be Named. They hate him. Oh my God, they hate him.
I got up to go to the bathroom. I'm in there, doing my thing, and I hear a pitiful ". . . miu . . ." from outside the curtain. Brushing it aside, I see all three cats sitting in a line, staring fixedly into the bathroom, just waiting for me to come out. They're terrified. They can't be alone with him, or he will kill them and lick out their brains.
All that day and the next they followed me around like sad little ghosts. I was not cat-free for more than twenty minutes all day. They just took turns being pathetic.
Now they've adjusted to the horror enough to have screaming catfights at the tops of their lungs. And while the other three have not an eighth of a Siamese among them, Mathurin is easily a quarter because he is one of the loudest cats I have ever had. They're also feeling spry enough to break their litter training in new and acrobatic places, such as behind the entertainment center, where we have to resort to tool use, like apes fishing about in a termite mound, to retrieve the mess, because the cabinet itself weighs ten thousand pounds and is directly connected to the gravitational field of the earth, and therefore cannot be shifted so much as an inch.
Matt's doing better. He's very old, and he's a little wobbly on his feet. I don't know if that's age, or if he's not been eating enough. It's hard to get him to eat, even when I stay and guard him from the other cats. He has fleas, and he's really thin. I don't know how much longer I'll have with him.
He's a good cat. A really good cat. And I owe props to my sister. I had no idea, but my parents were just going to have him put down without telling me. She was the one who insisted they tell me. So I really had no right to say anything mean about her. She actually saved his hairy, black life a little bit longer.
I'll get pictures when he comes out enough to get a good one. Black cats are very hard to photograph, because they suck up all available light.
*yawn*
I think that's all the babbling I have in me for now.