Alien Cat

This morning, there was a cat in my house.
Not Poki, the cat that is supposed to be in my house. Poki was on the roof, meowing at the window, as is her wont.
No, the cat that was in my house this morning was a different cat. A foreign cat. A cat masquerading as Poki.

She might have pulled it off, too, if she had crept into the house of one not quite as discerning as I.

She was pure black, just like Poki.
And small, just like Poki.
And quick, just like Poki.
But even out of the corner of my eye, distracted by the mounds of laundry that I was sorting and folding, I could tell that she wasn’t Poki.

It was the tail that gave her away.

Poki’s tail is crooked. There is a 45° angle bend at the very tip. The tail I saw disappearing behind a post, was straight as an arrow.
And, it was fat. A straight, fat, tail. Definitely not Poki’s.

I abandoned the warmth of my freshly laundered clothes and gave chase.
Out of the laundry room, over the landing, into the family room. And that’s where I lost her.

The family room, in the middle of a major overhaul, is construction central. Furniture is stacked “out of the way”, in the corners, and there are tools and wire, sawdust and nails, everywhere.
The imposter disappears into the shadows of this chaos.

I go back into the laundry room and continue my sorting and folding.
Quietly.
Waiting for the fuzzy black face of the alien cat to reappear.

No luck.

I stack my laundry and carry it upstairs. I am sure that the fact that I am leaving will be exactly the magnet I need to draw the cat out of hiding.
But when I creep back downstairs, deftly avoiding the squeaky step, I discover I am wrong.

Still no cat.

And so I begin cooing “here kitty, kitty, kitty” in the most alluring, I-am-a-cat-lover tone of voice I can manage.

Alien cat is not impressed.

I change tactics and begin banging on tables, stomping my feet and yelling “scat, scat, go away you cat!” I go for one last moment defining stomp and my foot, shoeless as usual, comes down on the edge of a nail. I grab my foot and forcefully swallow the expletive that has traveled in less than a nanosecond, from the ball of my right foot to the back of my throat and threatens to explode from my lips with the fury of a shaken pop bottle. As I cradle my foot and hop in ever shrinking circles, I’m sure that I hear the cat snickering from the safety of friendly black shadow.

I glance at the clock and notice that, in five minutes, I will be late for work.

“Shit!!!” The “bottle cap” jettisons across the room.

I fly back upstairs, grab my shoes and scream off to work.
Nine hours later, I return home.

I open the basement door and am assaulted with the unmistakable smell of alien-cat-trapped-in-a-basement-all-day-with-no-way-out-and-no-litterbox.
Flipping on the light, I tiptoe gingerly down the stairs so as to avoid stepping in any surprises.
In the basement, I discover that sawdust that has been swept into a pile and forgotten goes a long way towards containing the river of cat pee that wanted to snake across the floor. I make a mental note not to complain about construction debris – at least not today.

I feel silent eyes watching me as I move quietly around the room. They pierce my skin and I start to itch. It is driving me CRAZY!!! I know alien cat is somewhere in my basement.

WHERE?!

I open the outside basement door and it cries out with the exquisite agony of Tinman moving for the first time after Dorothy oils him. The rusty creak is the signal for which alien cat was waiting, the call from the mother ship to come home.
Alien cat answers in a blur that streaks out the door and into the arms of a spring twilight pregnant with the anticipation of rain.