Dear Cat

Mid-attack, Midjourney

You were yowling. If you were bigger, I might have called it a growl, but you are small. I've heard you yowl before. Then, you were screaming, and I'd never heard that before, and then, you had my attention.

I was on the phone with my girlfriend. We used to live together. She and I had just started speaking, her voice piped into my ears via my white corded earbuds. I had just asked about her day, but the noises you were making demanded investigation. So you had some, let's call it most, of my attention.

I walked to the front door and peered out the same glass window that you were (from a higher vantage point), and after my eyes adjusted, I saw that the object of your ire was a cat. It was orange, and other than that, not particularly noteworthy.

I turned to return to my seat in the kitchen. A loud thud arrested my progress, and I turned back to regard you again.

You were throwing yourself at the glass. You and the orange cat seemed to be doing so in synchrony, each from your own side of the divide, levitating mirror images, claws out but glancing harmlessly off the metal reinforced window, the crucial quarter inch between you and the reality of true fur-flying ferocity.

After observing the tableau and gauging its rhythms, I concluded that I should do something about it. Yes, it was disruptive to my phone call, your continuous screaming and periodic thwacking, but I was also thinking of you. You seemed upset. You seemed as though you'd be grateful to have this encounter end. I am big and have opposable thumbs and more neurons than you, so I felt a responsibility. I waited for a lull in the action and again approached the window. I locked eyes with the orange cat and raised myself up to my full size and rapped on the window. Now outnumbered, the foreign feline turned tail and started to leave. I looked down at you, triumphant, trying my best to bridge the cross-species divide, to say, "We did it! The bad cat is gone."

Apparently, you interpreted the moment differently, because you took that opportunity to launch yourself roughly six feet into the air, claws first, similar to how you'd been launching yourself at the window, except now your angle of attack was more vertical, and now, instead of harmlessly glancing, your claws found easy purchase in my didn't-even-have-time-to-recoil face and tore the flesh asunder. (I've admired your athleticism and litheness before, but never have I had such an intimate demonstration.)

Immediately, there was blood. Before I could make sense, it was somehow already on my hands, my phone, my sweatshirt, the floor. It was dripping onto the rug, then the hardwood, as I shuffled back toward the nearest sink. I started to say something to my girlfriend, to try to tell her what had just happened, and why there'd been a pause, but after a half sentence, I realized she couldn't hear me. In the course of clawing the shit out of my face, you'd clawed my earbuds out of my ears as well, and now they trailed uselessly behind me on the ground. I disconnected and left them there, stammered something into the phone and hung up. I called my mother, the good doctor, for advice on bandaging and disinfecting best practices. Twenty minutes and paper towels later, I got the bleeding to stop.

It's been about 48 hours, and as I write this, the moment replays just behind my eyes for the 193th time (32 waking hours * 6 times/hour on average, not uniformly distributed).

You continue to behave completely normally. It's a strange experience to be waiting for an apology from a house cat. I'm not sure what form a satisfactory mea culpa would take, or if I'd even recognize it. And yet, though I know it shouldn't, your complete lack of acknowledgement irks me, because I cannot help but acknowledge what has happened between us every time I look in the mirror, every time I open my mouth to take a bite of food, or smile just a little too wide, and the wound opens again, and the blood trickles down my face again, and last night I did both of these in succession — first opening my mouth for a bite of fish, then smiling ruefully, as I felt my lip open and then a rivulet pooling briefly at the bottom of my chin before seeing it fall, drop by drop, staining my white rice red.

Sincerely,
One of the humans who feeds you sometimes