I was on the couch the other night watching one of those reality shows (the kind I claim to despise) when a mountain lion attacked me. The savage creature leapt up and ravaged my arm right when I was about to discover which obnoxious person was getting voted off. Just latched onto it. There it was stuck inside the predator’s mouth. I screamed at the top of my lungs forcing my husband to break down the door to rescue me. Actually, he nonchalantly strolled in from the other room (ten minutes later), saw the blood gushing from my arm (by then I had managed to detach my chewed up limb from the beast’s mouth) and said, “Now what has she done?”
She is our cat. Our psychotic and often possessed cat. Okay, she’s not officially a mountain lion but she’s close.
When Squeak first came to live with us as an adorable seven-week-old kitten I was filled with joy. That is until I picked her up and she bit me on the neck.
“She’s like a baby Nosferatu directly from Transylvania,” I told a co-worker.
I was informed it was a love bite. Her “love bites” soon turned into “madly in love bites” for I was getting gnawed on several times a day with extra bonus nibbles on the weekends. Even though I was forced to survive on a diet of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin, I didn’t lose a pound. “Help me,” became my daily mantra as I tried to pry her vampire fangs from whichever limb looked tasty that day.
“She’s just a little cat,” my husband said every time I was terrorized, which was every moment spent at home.
“I don’t see open wounds on your body,” I said every time blood oozed from my veins.
Somehow she only liked the taste of my blood. After consulting other pet owners, I discovered why.
She considered my husband master of the house and I her equal. “You’re just another cat to her,” a friend said. I didn’t realize I’d been licking body parts and visiting the litter box. Another friend told me to spray her. I had pepper spray that needed to be tested and was ready to teach my psychotic stalker a lesson when I was presented with a squirt bottle. “Fill with water and you’re ready for battle,” she said.
I felt like a proud gun slinger with my weapon intact. But there were times when I forgot my weapon, when I couldn’t locate my weapon, or my weapon was out of ammunition and I couldn’t make it to the faucet to reload.
In weak motherly moments, the psycho predator seduced me into allowing her to sit on my lap. After all, she never sat on my husband’s lap.
“Don’t get sucked in,” he said. And sure enough, I’d be running for the Band Aids.
Before she grew into a full fledged mountain lion, I couldn’t decide whether she was Baby Girl Dracula or some other evil creature. The sounds she emitted when preparing to attack were purely demonic. I expected her head to start spinning like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist.
Most people would have returned the merchandise from whence it came, but not me. I was determined to mother a loving pet. Having no connections to Van Helsing, I decided on an exorcist.
Unfortunately, there were no listings in the yellow pages and no one seemed to have an exorcist’s number handy. I couldn’t approach the Catholic Church because of that divorce from the first husband so on to Plan B:
“Spectacular teeth,” Dr Warner said. My exorcist had a degree in veterinary medicine and a fondness for sharp fangs. He didn’t think Squeak was a vampire or a four-legged Linda Blair. His diagnosis: behavioral problems. His solution: drugs.
“This injection contains Deprovera,” he said. I’d heard that word before at the … GYNECOLOGIST’S?
“No birth control for me,” I said.
He explained something about hormones controlling the animal’s behavior, not mine. I was ecstatic. For a while. The attacks occurred only a few times a week as opposed to every day. Life was great. Then the shots stopped working. She was determined to be a psycho cat who grew into a full fledged psycho mountain lion eleven years later. Did I say eleven?
As I stare at my very infected arm, from the attack that interrupted my reality program, I have to wonder: Who is the real psycho?