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Barry
7 March 2006
Okay, look, it really was not meant to happen this way. I was going to be so sensible and organised about this: I was going to grieve, and miss my Misha-cat, and clean the house and sort a lot of stuff and do all those useful and pragmatic things you do when you are mourning. And then I was going to go away for a while, and I wasn't even going to think about a new cat until a new cat was imperative and it really was a new cat that I wanted, not just my Mishie back again.
Honestly, that is how it was going to be.
Only, I was in the vets to pay her final bill and so forth, and they said "Chaz, Chaz, we've got this young cat who urgently needs rehoming, and he's got such a sweet nature we thought of you straight away, and he's all black," as though that might somehow make a difference...
So I asked all sorts of serious & sensible questions, and then we were introduced, and now he's downstairs sniffing his way around the house inch by careful inch. He's been in hospital for a month or more, he smells of hospital (he was a stray with a collar wound under his leg, and so emaciated, they tell me he's doubled his weight since he came in but he still looks scrawny, tho' he's already a tremendous heft after Sophie & Misha, who were a pair of extreme lightweights) and he's covered with shaven places, but he's lean and rangy and exceedingly cat-like (yellow eyes, black whiskers, for those of you who were wondering) and he's here on a week's trial. I told the vet that, and he laughed at me. "Oh yes," he said, "he's coming back in a week. Not." I said we'd see. Well, he might not like living here...
Oh, and at the moment he's called Barry. This is obviously impossible. I am open to suggestions...
© Chaz Brenchley 2006
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.