Is It a Rule that All Cat Rescues Must End in Blood?

People, it’s barely even seven o’clock in the morning and I have already had a cat dangling from my bare boob by one claw. Not that there’s an acceptable hour of the day to find a cat’s whole body dangling from a claw in your bare chest, but at least, in the evening, after a few drinks, if you look down and find a cat embedded in your chest, you can just assume you fell in with some animal-loving inverted-suspenders. Or that you are merely a means to an end for cats who enjoy suspension.

But first thing in the morning? When you’re standing in on the garage steps in nothing but your nightie?

I now see why firemen wear their whole uniforms when they rescue cats.

Anyway, there’s not much to tell.  I was driving home last night, as I am wont to do, cruising from 5 Points over to Dickerson, across Trinity and up White’s Creek Pike, just me and the dark, interrupted occasionally by the lights from the signs of clumps of businesses, listening to Left Lane Cruiser, which is a band I should say more about, but won’t, just feeling like it was the kind of night where you hope to run into old women with cigarette creases at their bright red lips and men with oil deep in the folds of their hands.

I did not run into those folks, but I also couldn’t get my car in the garage, which apparently meant that the cat could not get down from the storage area above where the car goes. Normally, he just leaps from there, onto the roof of the car, and right down my windshield into the house. But this morning, he could not do that, because my car was still mostly in the driveway, at a strange angle with only the front right headlight actually in the garage.

So, I told him he would have to go onto the ledge over the outside door and then onto the outside door itself, where he would be close enough for me to grab and lift him down. Since this is the same cat that will go and fetch the dog when I need him to when it suits him, he understood the gist of what I was imparting.

However, since this is an animal with a brain the size of a walnut, once all paws were off the door, one paw was on my chest and almost instantly, that claw was sunk into my boob. And I, having a brain also the size of a walnut, immediately panicked and, people I am not even making this up, let go of the cat.

Yes, so for an incredibly stupid second, the whole weight of the cat was hanging from one claw embedded in my right boob.

It was sheer instinct.

Luckily, some even deeper, less stupid instinct grabbed back hold of the cat and lifted him up so that his claw could get loose from my flesh.

“Damn it,” I said, though it startled me, because I hadn’t realized I was going to say anything out loud at all, “I knew that was going to happen.”

But, of course, I did not.