I own a cat… I know I am the quintessential writer; I sit in my ivory tower spitting prose and petting my kitty. I do that sometimes, only when the tower is available, but I didn’t get a cat because of some arbitrary stereotype. In fact, I got a kitten because I wanted evolution’s best weapon living in my home. Yes, she is fuzzy and does goofy things, but I’ve watched her take bats down as they flew through my apartment. I’m not kidding, multiple times my cat has taken a bat out of the air and then proceeded to “play” with it for hours (I will discuss my bat problem at a different time). So this post isn’t about why cats are great, it is why my cat is great – click “Read More” to meet Sparkles.
When I come home from work, Sparkles will greet me at the door. A couple of meows will be exchanged (some from her and some from me), and as I go through the home, I will be followed until I sit down. At this point, I can dangle an arm and pet her head. If I don’t do this, she will either jump directly to my shoulders (without clawing me) or to my lap. After a quick cuddle section, she will move to the floor or bed and let me work.
She has caught 2.5 bats out of the air while living with me. Why .5? Because, at the time, she and her brother were living together and caught it as a team. I was writing Primo Capite and the Others at the time. I heard an awful howling and I turned to yell at them (they usually played aggressively). Instead of finding them battling one another, I turned to see them delivering a present: one on each side of a bat, their claws in its wing, and it stretched fully out. That bat survived. The second bat was one I saw when I got home from work. It flew behind the garbage can and crawled into the wall (I live in a shithole). Sparkles sat there all night and watched it, occasionally beating it on the head. When I awoke, it basically begged me to be let out. The third one, she must have had cornered under a toy for eight hours. When I found it, she was bopping it on the head every time it hissed. When I got her away, the bat took off and landed five feet away at eye level. I was able to pluck it from the wall without a fight – it was exhausted.
While Sparkles is a badass killing machine (or sadistic based on how you view her “playing” with her bat friends). She has a couple of key points that make her a great cat:
Sparkles can jump six feet in the air and catch toys in her mouth.
She loves to cuddle.
But the reason she is the greatest of all animals is that she knows when I am working and chooses to leave me alone (always nearby in case I need a break, but she never presses me for attention).
