An Impawsible Situation Read online

  AN IMPAWSIBLE SITUATION

  (A Food Bowl Mystery)

  KATHERINE HAYTON

  Copyright © 2018 Katherine Hayton

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  About the Author - Katherine

  Chapter One

  When my human served up the wrong brand of pet food, I tried to tell him nicely. I get it—we’re all overtired and stressed out these days. Choices can be overwhelming and sometimes, at the end of the day, I know that even I occasionally have a lapse in judgment.

  So, I mewed politely, pushed the bowl away and settled down to wait for him to correct the problem. How long does it take to operate a can opener? Not long. I mean, the man has opposable thumbs for a start—that’s an advantage over me.

  But my human didn’t get it.

  Either that, or he no longer cared about my feelings. It seems impossible to fathom, but I’ve heard from other cats on the network that such a thing happens from time to time. A cat would go along thinking everything was just fine, and then their human changed into a stranger.

  Sad, yes, but not unthinkable. Not when there was evidence of it happening to others before.

  I like to think that I have a modicum of humility. Sure, I’m a good cat—maybe the greatest ever—but there was a chance I don’t know it all. Perhaps my human was upset or got conked on the head and now had brain damage. Those things happened every day on the telly, so it was possible that could be the case with my human today.

  When the situation wasn’t rectified in a reasonable time frame, I tried mewing. There was a trick a learned a long time ago, to put a mournful spin into the lower notes. It gets my human every time.

  Every time but this one.

  Finally, I’d had enough. It was well past feeding time by that stage, and I couldn’t eat the muck that my human had laid out for me. I tipped the bowl onto its edge until the food inside went over the floor.

  I expected a new bowl. I expected some apologies for the long wait. What I didn’t expect was to be picked up under my belly and plonked down on the other side of the door.

  As it slammed in my face, I hunched down. There was too much information to process all at once—I crouched in absolute stillness while all the individual bits filtered through in smaller, manageable chunks.

  Had I done something terrible?

  I ran through a quick checklist of the day so far. I’d woken and immediately stalked through the house to jump onto my human’s face. He likes to be woken up that way. “Better than an alarm clock,” he always says with an appreciable laugh.

  Nothing wrong there.

  I’d gone out for a quick fossick in the garden. Although I don’t hunt any longer, not since my human staked a claim on me and affixed a bell around my neck, I dug into the underbrush for any stray tidings.

  Not like a heathen dog, you understand. Just looking for a bird trapped in the lower branches or for a fledgling tossed too soon out of its nest. When I spot those things, I like to play with them, if they’re willing. Sometimes they just drop dead—no fun at all—but often I can coax a few hours of sport out of a healthy partner.

  Nothing had been there this morning, though. Perhaps that was it? I thought back, counting through the days. It had been a very long time since I brought my human a present. I usually take care to provide him with fresh kills reasonably often because no matter which way I sliced it, the man was useless as a hunter.

  Even with a tinkling bell on the collar around my neck, I still fared far better than him. To appease his lack of ability, I tried my best to lay a few gifts around the place. He was so big that I was sure the sparrows and mice were just a one-bite snack, but that was better than nothing.

  My human had such a funny yelp of pleasure when he saw I’d laid a surprise out for him. It gave him twice as much joy—judging by the volume alone—when I could swing bringing him breakfast in bed.

  So, yeah. Perhaps there was a smidgeon of blame to lay at my door. A few weeks had passed since I last put in the effort to hunt out a present. Honestly, if I’d known that my human liked them that much, I might have tried harder. Sometimes, I feel like the work I expend isn’t truly appreciated. Apparently, I was wrong.

  Just because I thought I’d found the root of the issue, didn’t mean that I could solve it there and then. As I’ve already mentioned, the collar causes me a few setbacks. Well worth it for the exchange of a clean house and the highest quality dining—up until now, of course—but still, it hampers me all the same.

  That, plus the season for fledglings was well over. Even the tardiest of male birds had got his seed well and truly sown by now. Those sparrows do an excellent job in sprouting new crops of entertainment throughout the spring and summer, but heading into autumn even the biggest stud needed a rest.

  Luckily for me, I knew a house just one section over where the human was mental enough to attempt to raise her own supply of mice. I got Gerald’s attention—he was the tom down the road—and after a quick negotiation on how many times he could cut through my yard, I managed to finagle a treat for the human.

  As added flare to let him know it was special, I pulled out the mouse’s entrails to clearly display the variety of sweetmeats that its succulent corpse offered.

  Then I waited.

  The slow rising of the morning sun was pleasant on my back. As I crossed my paws and laid my head down, it felt as soothing as a soft caress. With my tail doing duty on the midges hanging around—they, too, like a nice bit of mouse for their breakfast—I closed my eyes and the day jumped forward a bit, as it does.

  I stretched out for a while, then chased after a moth. It knew what the score was—dancing and fluttering right by my paws, it could hardly have expected otherwise.

  The sun had grown in power. I pawed at the cat door, not really wanting to go inside until the human found its treat but torn. The rays of sunlight would just be starting to flow across the carpet near the television. That meant the residual heat from the appliances would tingle along my back while I exposed half my belly to the bright sun.

  Choices were so hard. I don’t know why life puts so many in my way.

  I nudged up against the cat door, still not fully committed one way or the other. My human was pacing back and forth in the lounge, so quickly that friction would catch me in a spark from the carpet if I went in there now. Back to the step, then.

  I’d barely got myself settled back down before my human came out the door.

  “Here you go,” I said, proudly displaying the catch with a wave of my paw. While my human stared in delight, I pushed past him to dance in a quick circle around my bowl.

  He’d been busy. In the time I’d been outside arranging his present, my human had cleaned the floor up of the wrong food, every last scrap.

  Still—I nudged my nose against the empty bowl—it would have been even better if he’d filled it up before I arrived back inside.

  Listen to my demands, I thought, giving a chuckle. How foolish. Lovely as he was, my human couldn’t read minds. Sometimes, I honestly believed he was a bit simple if you wanted the unvarnished truth.

  Still, I had chosen him, and he needed me, so we rub along together quite nicely. In case he had forgotten the reciprocation
required when I presented him with a gift, I gave a soft meow.

  Nothing.

  I batted the bowl aside, giving it a look of confusion before padding outside. While my human shoveled up the mouse and every last bit of its entrails from the welcome mat, I circled around between his legs, offering encouragement.

  He sauntered away to the garage. My poor human tried his best, but he just doesn’t quite have enough swagger. Oh. And he clipped the edge of the door with his shoulder hard enough to make the wall shake. Ouch. Lucky, I gave him a treat, or he might have been out of sorts.

  With nothing better on offer, I scampered inside to lie in the sun until he had finished up with his gift. I stretched out my limbs to their greatest length, pretending for a moment that I was a giant, lumbering about. My claws were tensed, needing a little bit of a workout after the strange upset in my morning routine. I flexed them and dug them into the carpet, arching into the woolen hooks and pulling back until they met nothing but resistance.

  Oh, yeah. That’s the good stuff, right there.

  The door slammed as my human came back inside. I expected him to refill my bowl immediately, but instead, he wandered off to the shower. Fair enough. Who doesn’t like to give themselves a thorough wash after they’d eaten?

  Still, my stomach was rumbling. I hadn’t felt this way for a good long while—not since I first moved in and trained my human up.

  I’d been born out on the streets, you see. I wasn’t one of your pampered house pets that gets its own way from the day it’s born. No. I had to cut my own path from life and find my own human before I could settle down. There were a lot of dud houses that I poked my nose into before I tracked down this one. As soon as I peeked in through the back door here, that had been left wide open on a summer’s day, I knew this was the one.

  My human took a little bit more convincing.

  At first, I’d saunter into the kitchen while he was making dinner and stalk in circles around his legs. Back then, he’d given a laugh of surprise every time I came in. He playacted as though he wasn’t expecting me, though he’d obviously left the door open for that exact purpose.

  It took a week to wear him down. Once I’d done that, I had to undergo a trial that I never speak of. The horror of the memory alone makes me shudder. Still, we ended up together, and that’s how things are meant to be.

  To be hungry when I was exactly where I was meant to be doing exactly what I should was a travesty.

  The bowl couldn’t fill itself, and my human didn’t seem concerned. Without access to the pantry, the fourth shelf, a can opener, and the thumbs to work it, I wouldn’t be able to cure the first ill by myself. Making my human care, though? That could be arranged.

  Time to mount a full auxiliary attack of cuteness.

  I’m not as small as I was the first time I wandered into this house and realized it was mine. Not that I’m flabby, far from it. But I was just a kitten back then. Nowadays, my legs fit my paws, if you know what I mean.

  The wide-eyed-chase-anything-that-dangles-in-front-of-me cuteness stage might be long gone, but that doesn’t mean I’m powerless. If I pull down my shoulders a bit and tuck in my hind legs, I can make myself look smaller. Then I tilt my head to the side—just so—and display those big ears for all they’re worth.

  Who can resist a little cat with big ears? Nobody.

  My human wasn’t paying a lot of attention, though. I rattled the bowl across the kitchen floor and back again, but he barely glanced my way. As soon as one phone call was finished, another would begin. I loathe that stupid handset, though not as much as the little square device it keeps in its pocketses. THAT was the devil’s work.

  No matter how much I’d tried to stop him using it, the weak human kept getting hypnotized by the screen. Sometimes for hours. If you wanted to see what a world populated by the living dead looked like, try handing them all one of those devices, and you’d come pretty close.

  The pantry, then. I might have other challenges awaiting me inside, but at least if I got the door open, my human might remember that I still hadn’t eaten. He doesn’t like me going in there alone—so I respect his wishes and don’t—but today was a special occasion. Today I was beginning to get very hungry indeed.

  My stomach gave a resounding rumble of encouragement as I went to work, clawing the door.

  There’s a handle up above my head, but even at full stretch, I’m an arm-length short on snagging it. Down the bottom, I know that I can get the magnetized catch to open, but I have to embed my claws almost down to the fur to do it. That takes work. That takes dedication.

  Luckily, my empty stomach growled at me in motivation, so I was set on that score. Nothing could distract me from the task.

  The trick to embedding my claws deep enough was to gently apply greater force while ignoring how the pressure turned to pain. I’d Zen out at moments like that. My body would curl into as tight a ball as I could get it and then I used its weight as an aid to dig in deeper.

  Mm. Deeper and deeper. There is no pain, there is only the goal.

  If I let my claws get stuck too far in, of course, then I’d never manage to drag them back out. There was a skill and a trick to everything in life, and I wasn’t sure I’d mastered this one yet.

  I wriggled my shoulders and waggled my tail as though chasing prey. I was, too, just in a different way.

  Try it now!

  I heaved my body back while arching my paw, enabling my claws to stay at the needed angle. The door resisted, the magnet was intense, it seemed I was doomed to fail.

  Then it released. Triumph.

  I wedged my body in between the wooden-slatted doors of the pantry. There was no way that after such an accomplishment, I’d let it go to waste by allowing the door to swing closed.

  I might have dug my claws in a bit too hard, though. For a few moments, I struggled to extract them, imagining an entire life stretching out ahead with me fastened to a door.

  Nope. Phew. My claws popped out just as I thought I couldn’t take the strain any longer. Sure, I’d have an ache that settled in until I could rest my body with sleep, but I’d accomplished my goal.

  One pantry open. Hint, hint, human!

  With the work half done for him, I expected that he’d soon get to work in filling up my bowl. For the longest time, though, he just paced back and forth, still whining over the phone.

  The call went on for so long that I stared down at my paws, checking that I hadn’t turned invisible.

  If my human wasn’t going to obey the simple command for food, my life would suddenly take a very wrong turn. The shelves stretched high into the air above me, a siren call that I wasn’t sure I could heed.

  Once upon a time, I’d gotten into the pantry and tried to rearrange the supplies sensibly. Shelf by shelf, I’d pushed off each item so that it lay—handily within reach—on the floor.

  My human took one look at the masterpiece of work that had taken me the entire day and dismissed it out of hand. Not only that, he’d shoved me outside while yelling, a sure sign that someone had upset him.

  I wasn’t thick. It only took me a few more goes to understand that my human didn’t comprehend the sense of stacking everything within paw’s reach. My masterful arrangement went unappreciated. I stopped trying when it became clear that it could only end in tears.

  So, if I attempt to clamber up the nonsensically high shelves to retrieve my food, there’s a chance that I’ll undo all the goodwill I’ve gained by providing him with a treat. After risking a quick foray out of the pantry to see what’s up, I had to scurry back in the most undignified way to stop the door from slowly swinging shut.

  Come on! What’s so important that it takes precedence over feeding me?

  The thought was so exhausting that I lay down with my head on my paws and fell asleep.

  I woke to a loud bang. My human had just slammed the phone down in its holder. Or, what used to be its holder and was now just a few jagged bits of plastic that he switched off
at the wall.

  I positioned myself again for maximum cuteness, and this time it worked. My human picked me up and held me to his chest, stroking my back while he muttered into my fur. Something about clients and stock market downturns. To be honest, I tried to pay attention when he rambled on, but half the time I didn’t know what he was talking about. It might have seemed rude, but to be fair, my human never bothered to listen much to me.

  I knew that humans were a bit slow when it came to language skills. For all the time we’d been together, he still couldn’t differentiate between a mew and a blood-curdling meow.

  I turned my head, distracted from his one-sided conversation by the glint of a can catching the corner of my eye. In horror, I surveyed the fourth shelf—the one where my food had always been stored—and came to a shocking realization.

  Not only had my human opened a can of the wrong food that morning, but more of the same was sitting on that shelf. Wrong brand. Wrong label. Wrong breed of cat pictured on the side.

  When my human let me down and picked up another can of the wrong food, I didn’t bother to wait for him to open it.

  Something had gone terribly wrong with our routine. I’d need to do more than open a pantry door if I wanted to sort this mess out.

  Chapter Two

  As soon as my human left the house for the morning—something he did for a longer period each day—I began my investigation. First off, I jumped onto the tallboy in his bedroom and teased open the top drawer with my paw. That was where my human had always stored his receipts.

  The horror just kept piling on. If this impawsible situation continued for much longer, it would drive me around the bend. Not only had my human purchased the wrong brand of food, but he’d also bought it from the wrong shop.

  Hanmer Springs wasn’t the biggest town in the country, so I’ve heard. Adventuresome cats who had traveled here over the years—some staying, some departing—had informed me of larger, bustling metropolises where you couldn’t venture onto the road for fear of being hit by a car.