Based on a True Story

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
of the weirdest shower so far this year….

First, I get in the shower and realize that my new shampoo isn’t there. So I jump out of the shower and runs in circles around my apartment, dripping wet and naked, trying to figure out what I did with it. The cats are freaking out, especially Peach. She thought she’d found a nice, stable human, and then this shit?!

After about ten minutes, I finally give up, and then realize there’s one place I haven’t checked: in the corner between my shelf and the shower. Yep. In reach from inside the shower that whole time.

So I’m finally washing my hair, etc., when one of my cats, Ankhesnamun, starts meowing all of a sudden. It’s her “mommy, I want something and I need you to get it for me!!” meow. I pull the curtain aside, and she is RIGHT on the edge of the tub. She turns around to look inside and almost falls in. Then she goes away.

Five minutes later, she’s at the other end of the shower, looking at me through the gap in the curtain, and when she sees that I see her, she starts meowing again, but I can’t figure out what she wants. I close the curtain.

She sits outside meowing, and I hear her jump up on the edge of the tub again, but, before I can do anything, she jumps into the shower.

Now, like many cats, Ankhesnamun is fascinated by running water. She really likes to sit by the sink and drink water from the tap. But she does not like to be wet, and suddenly she is VERY wet and very unhappy.

It’s like she didn’t understand what was going on in the shower. She looked twice and did not seem to like the moisture. Maybe she thought that if she surprised the water, it would flee in terror.  Maybe she was disbelieving to dispel the illusion of a circumstance which violated her iron-clawed control of the New World Order.  Maybe the three of them are having a crazy competition and I get to be the judge. (Suna’s clearly winning so far.)

I have no idea I and I’m not sure I’m expected to, so I just watch.

Naturally, she panics when her plan (whatever very us was) is foiled by water being wet, and immediately tries to jump back out.  But the tub is smooth porcelain and getting better every second, so she can’t get traction and she ends up  she sliding further towards my end of the shower (where the shower shower is showering showily) and gets even wetter. And, this whole time, she’s meowing furiously at me like this whole fiasco is my fault, but that’s absurd, so I think it’s probably due to the fact that I am unsympathetically laughing my ass off.

She finally gets back out of the shower, and I hear a few things slam and get knocked over elsewhere in the apartment.  Then somebody hisses at her (presumably whichever cat she chased as a coping mechanism for her humiliation), and there’s a short scuffle and some yeowling. Then…silence.

I finish my shower in peace, towel off, and am putting hair goop on in preparation for blow-drying my hair when Ankhesnamun reappears. She casually saunters back into the bathroom she fled barely five minutes ago as if daring me to point out that she is still, at a minimum, quite damp (though she finally fives the shower a wide berth), looks at me with a strangely regal presence: she is the Queen of the Great Catdom Sunimunimunamun, and for the benefit of her fellow felines, she has taken a bold stand against the Evil Empire of Things That Are Wet When I Don’t Want Wet Things. In response to the Empire’s defiance of her edict that wet things must stand outside and drip-dry for fifteen minutes before getting to come back in, Queen Ankhesnamun will bide her time until there’s something innocuous to attack vociferously.

As I’m worrying about a plan to, perhaps, booby trap the shower with a bomb in the spigot, I find myself resigned to inevitability of unexpectedly exploding in an impromptu sacrifice which all kittykind would honor if I fed them first. Besides, as the old adage goes, dulce et decorum est pro catria mori.

I glance at Suna, wondering if she will plant the bomb herself or get Peach to do it; surely Little Baby is too terrified of everything (named Peach) to be involved. But her queenly demeanor has melted away, and she is just about to open with the first bars of, “I will soon be a dessicated corpse because you won’t put me on the counter and turn the sink on and, ew, Peach drinks out of those water bowls.”

As tempting as it is to point out that she’s going to be a soaking wet dessicated corpse, which seems rather unusual, my body already bears a variety of nicks and slashes from not warning Little Baby that I was going to roll over in my sleep, and so I demure. Instead, I lift her up to the counter (which she is totally capable of reaching on her own, especially if I’m trying to put my face on), support her until she’s on steady footing (pawing?), and then turn the faucet on just how she likes it. I pat her in the shoulders and tell her I love her. (Specifically, what I said was, “whatever, weirdo; you do you.)

My live-and-let-cats-be-crazy philosophy is instantly cast into doubt as Ankhesnamun immediately dunks her entire head into the stream of water in order to prove that logic has no power over her. I roll my eyes when she’s not looking and go back to what I was doing.

I’m getting my hair dryer out when I hear it:

scrabble scrabble thunk clang MIAAAAAAAAOU scrabble…

thud.

I whirl around to goggle at this new triumph of indoor plumbing over my smartest cat (Little Baby has serious issues, and Peach can’t figure out what “treats” means), but not quite quickly enough. All I see is the back of her as she makes a mad dash out of the bathroom, tail low to the floor and ears flat against the soaking, sopping, dripping, wet fur plastered to her skull.

I got the impression that she was embarrassed, so I didn’t follow right away. Rather, I paused and took a moment to reconcile evidence of feline embarrassment with the widely-known and thoroughly-established fact that cats have no shame. How does that work?

When I found her a couple of hours later, Ankhesnamun gave me the sad news: she gasped and struggled through an explanation that she had had a bath, the worst thing that could happen to a cat queen, for she was no longer worthy to lead her people… And then my heart stopped as she informed me that she had been sentenced to drown as a consequence. It wouldn’t be long now, she sighed. She was drowning already. Death was near. (But she was in her kitty bed by my piano, so water was not near, and I wanted to ask her what she thought “drowning” meant, but I didn’t want to squander her last few moments but squabbling over whether ant if this was possible.)

I stayed by her side until the end, gently scratching the side of her face until she turned her head so I could scratch the other side. A rumbling sound seemed to emanate from her chest (her lungs filling with water, I assume) and her eyelids drooped. She rallied one last time and looked into my eyes. I told her she was a very good kitty. As her eyelids began to close again, this time forever, she expended what strength remained to her and gasped out a final message, honoring us both (Peach was there, too, intermittently interested but not overly concerned; I couldn’t get a straight answer as to why) with her last words:

“Apresunamoi, le Deluge.”