The Lint-Covered Breast Implant and Attention Withdrawal Symptoms
Toward the end of the year, and Parker the 10-Kilo Lint-Covered Breast Implant has adapted to his new life. Reasonably adapted, anyway. He still screams at random times about going outside, but he’s acknowledged that the only way he’s going outdoors is with a harness and lead and with an escort. He and I have quite the King Ezekiel and Shiva relationship, with Sarah filling in for Carol Peltier, with the same understanding that Parker could and would eat me if given half the chance. In fact, his favorite game now is to jump on the bed while I’m asleep and gently nip my inner wrist just to see if I’m still reacting. One of these days, he WILL feed.
This time of the year, he generally mellows out, both on wanting to go out and wanting to experiment with the relationship his relations had with my relations a couple of million years ago. His various nemeses, cat and rabbit, don’t wander through the back yard in the middle of the night once temperatures go below freezing, and his initial rush to get in the back yard is leavened by his realization that the concrete hurts his feet when he steps out on it. Now that the final fusion of two households is nearly complete, he has his favorite slingback chair (a favorite of cats since my late cat Jones first took it over in the early 1990s) in a spot by the front door, with lots of December sun shining through the door all day, and plenty of other spaces to bask should he feel inclined. At night, both he and Sarah have me as their bed heaters, and often I wake up in the middle of the night as a “Paul panini.” We should all have it so rough: better to be squashed than shoved off the bed entirely. In that vein, Parker also indulges, getting on a corner of blanket, stretching out, and squeezing my legs out like edamame. As with other cats in my life, telling him “You know, animals sleep on the floor” gets a response of “Better grab a blanket, because it’s cold down there,” but Parker is the only one to get vocal about it.
Such was the state of affairs until the beginning of this month. My last adventure in Dallas County jury duty was two years ago, literally days after getting out of the hospital after an adventure with an exploded appendix (the notice came the day I went to the ER, and by the time I was able to check printed mail, it was too late to ask for a rescheduling), so it was high time to enter the jury pool and fulfill basic responsibilities of citizenship. Take the train to downtown Dallas, sit in the main jury room for a couple of hours, and get sent home having completed my day of obligation: that’s how it worked every other time, so it shouldn’t be any different this time, right?
Oh, how the gods laugh. The two-week trial involving capital murder charges is well outside the subject of this little missive, but that one-day trip turned into very early mornings and very late evenings, and combined with ridiculously short daylight, made Parker a very cranky kitty. I’d come home, almost immediately go to bed, and wake up in the early hours with him perched on my butt, soaking up body heat. When the alarm clock went off, he curled up in my armpit and tried to keep me there, and after the third day, he knew my new schedule and woke me up with a plaintive yowl about five minutes early. The only thing he hated more than my leaving before the sun came up was my returning well after dark, and he was determined to let me know this, usually by nipping at my ankles or knees to get my notice.
Well, as with other things, the trial ended, the jury disbanded, and we were all free to return home and process everything that had happened. Me, I got to go home to a ten-kilo lump of spite and rage, determined to make me pay for abandoning him. Two years ago, the last time I left him for days, he expressed his feelings by climbing into a bookcase by my bed and jumping on a very fresh and tender abdominal incision, multiple times over three or four nights. This time, the only wounds were mental and the bookcase was boobytrapped to keep him from getting a high perch, so he moved to new strategies.
To start, he had already learned that Sarah sleeps like the dead most nights, so walking on her in the wee hours has no effect on her, but it definitely works on me. Decades of post-Catholic guilt meant that as soon as he sauntered off me and onto her, I was up to grab the cat and keep him from waking her. Yes, she tells me she doesn’t notice his nocturnal perambulations, but I do, and Parker knows that I know. Since then, he now shifts to jumping over the both of us to wake up somebody, occasionally stumbling off the side of the bed and crashing on the floor if he miscalculates the leap. Either way, it gets the desired effect, usually with my threatening to make up a batch of cat fajitas served in a matching Davy Crockett cap. “Ha ha,” Parker says in Cat, “You know my relations used to take down mammoths, right?”
The Saturday after the trial, though, was the real challenge. The trial ended in early afternoon, and getting out relatively early meant a rush to pack up for other obligations. Obligations met and exceeded, I realized that I am now far too old to be staying up 24 hours at a time, so it was a matter of getting home before I needed a corner to crash in until the next afternoon. The idea was to sleep until I woke up. Parker not only had other plans, but had a full offensive and defensive schedule to implement them. And AutoCAD drawings, too.
The war started at approximately 2 in the morning, just a couple of hours after getting to bed:
“Hey.”
“Whuh.”
“HEY.”
“Go away, cat.”
“HEY!”
“What do you want?”
“Get up.”
“It’s 2 ayem. Some of us need sleep.”
“Get up NOW.”
“Hmph.”
“Get UP. It’s an EMERGENCY!”
“Cat, are you out of food?”
“NOW.” I knew it was bad, because Parker was using one of his favorite English words.
Slide out of bed. Grab a bathrobe because the bedroom was cold. Grab glasses. “What’s up?”
“NOW!”
Follow the cat down the hall, his alternating between racing and stopping to make sure I’m following him. Go to the kitchen. Cat stops by the refrigerator to ensure I’m following, and then heads to the laundry room and his food bowl.
“Oh, geez, I’m sorry. I should have checked your bowl before I went to bed.”
“Follow, you damn dirty ape.”
Get to the food bowl. “See? What are you going to do about this?”
I look at the bowl. Parker looks at the bowl. I filled it that evening, and aside from a dent in the middle, the guacamole bowl is still full of cat food. “What?”
“About time you got here. Now watch me eat.”
Deliberate between just wandering back to bed and making one-half of a pair of cat slippers. Returning to a blessed coma wins out. “Whatever. Have fun.”
“Wait. You need to WATCH ME. NOW.”
After two nights of this, I now dread to think of what he’ll do if I have to leave for more than a day for business. Maybe having him drag my corpse into a tree isn’t the worst thing to happen.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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