A Tabby Coated Watermelon

Posted on January 30, 2004 in Cats

Fiona comes to bother me while I write on the computer. She’s grown large, round. She looks like a white and tabby striped watermelon with muscular legs, a cat head, and sixteen needles in her white stocking feet.

Oh those claws! She uses them to hoist herself into my lap. It’s bad enough when I have my pants on, worse when I have rushed out of the shower to enter a burning thought or a correction into the weblog. I don’t think she gets the concept of nakedness. Fibers springing from the skin clothe cats. Unless they lose a hunk of the scalp in a fight — as Fiona did herself just a few weeks ago — these threads never come off. I know from examining the wound that she wears like a sash across her breast that she’s pink beneath the white fur and slate gray beneath the tabby part.

I hold her like I’ve seen Jesus holding the lamb in depictions of the Good Shepherd: the legs held straight, the paws pointed towards the apex of an inverted triangle.

She purrs loudly and presses the top of her head close to my lips for a kiss.