The Tick Tock Cat

Word count: 1438

THE TICK TOCK CAT

Don’t get me wrong, I love cats, I really do, but cats can be pretty strange animals. Katrina, the cat that owns my wife and myself, was a Siamese and those are just about the strangest cats of all. (Besides, have you ever heard a Siamese cat howl? It’s the highest pitched caterwauling you can imagine and never forgotten.)

Katrina was really a pretty good cat though and was rather well trained – for a cat. She doesn’t get into things that are “no-noes”, uses her potty box on a regular basis, doesn’t chew up stuff she shouldn’t and never sharpens her claws on anything in the house except for her “sharpening post”.

Still, one day Princess Katrina jumped up on a display shelf where my wife had a prize ceramic vase and knocked it to the floor where one of the handles broke clean off. Now this vase had been given to her by her mother years and years ago and my wife wailed, “Can you fix it hon, pleeeeaaaase.” She’s good at that kinda pleading, a tear starting to form in the corner of her eye and her voice trembling -- makes a guy feel like a knight in shining armor riding a pure white horse as he comes to the damsel’s rescue.

Duct tape is wonderful stuff. I’ve seen it used to make an entire Halloween costume and even a small sailboat on TV’s “Mythbusters” but I know for a fact it doesn’t work very well as bicycle inner tube patching material and I instantly dug through the “junk drawer” in the kitchen where all of the important, but little used, stuff in the house is stored and grabbed a fresh tube of Krazy Glue.

Katrina was watching me all this time from the top of her carpet covered cat castle in the corner of the room. I could tell she was wondering what was going on but wasn’t about to saunter over and investigate for her tail tip was twitching every few seconds. Now a tail twitch in a cat usually means they are on the hunt for game and soon will make an attack but Katrina knew she was in trouble for breaking the vase and she held her position. In minutes I had the vase repaired and sitting back on the shelf.

I returned to the computer where I was reading important email forwarded to me by a friend who sent every joke, every funny photo and tons of virus warnings (that never checked out on “Snopes.com”) when I saw Krafty Katrina jump up on the display shelf, sniff the vase, shake her head from the vile fumes still emanating from the glue and promptly jumped back down. Since then she has left the shelf unvisited. Hey, I said she was strange, not dumb.

Some things seem to send her into cationic behaviors one of which are Pink balloons. She LOVES ‘em. The tongue-colored inflatable spheres attract her quicker than catnip attracts a normal cat. When we get a couple during the “Think Pink” local cancer awareness drive Katrina spots them instantly and will spend ten minutes batting one around the house (never with her claws out), take a break and walk away with a haughty look that only a cat can give --  then flash back outta nowhere for another round of “balloon ball” down the hallway or around the new laminated kitchen floor.

Once, the antique spring-driven clock on the fireplace mantle stopped running. We all know a stopped clock isn’t good for anything except collecting dust – which we had in abundance on the vases on the display shelf. I wish I could blame Katrina, but this time I wasn’t surprised at it stopping for the spring key handle had snapped off a couple of months before and I had been winding it up using a pair of long-nosed pliers. I figured I had forgotten to wind it for a week and the clock had just run down.

I took the broken key pieces to the last clock repair guy in town to see if he could fix it. What with all the digital electronic stuff now, and cell phones replacing watches, the profession of “watch repairman” was dying right along with typewriter repair shops and newspaper. This clock guy worked out of an old, run-down building on the wrong side of the tracks. Still he seemed to be doing well judging from the brand new 4x4 diesel pickup parked at the side of the building with a huge fifth wheel hitched behind it.

He flipped his jewelers’ loupe out of the way when I walked in, looked at the key, then fished around in a junk drawer for five minutes before he found the right size used brass key. It looked like it would work just fine, but I was lighter by fifteen bucks plus tax.

Back home I returned to the clock and opened the front glass to see if the key really worked when suddenly Katrina was there to give me feline advice. I was surprised at her appearance because unless I happened to be carrying her food bowl full of “Rich Gourmet Cat Delite” to the feeding area, or cleaning out her litter box, she would ignore what I was doing. She usually preferred to sleep on a couch pillow or the top of her cat house where she could keep track of both her humans and everything going on in her domain.

She watched as I kept trying to put the key on the little square thingie that you turn to wind up the spring. It didn’t want to go on very well. Finally I noticed the chuck part of the key seemed to be full of dirt or maybe rust. I took out my pocket knife and cleaned it out over a piece of newspaper on the coffee table. Katrina jumped down from the mantle and came over to help me.

When I was finished, she decided it would be fun to play with the grit on the newspaper. It only took about a minute before she had pawed it all off the paper and onto the carpet. Figuring it wasn’t much grit anyways, I ran my fingers back and forth over the carpet to spread it around and make it disappear into the carpet pile. Katrina looked up at me and cocked her head, either pissed for taking away the play grit or threatening to tell my wife. I grunted and just smiled back at her figuring either way I was pretty safe since my wife doesn’t understand cat language.

Back at the mantle I was ready to slip the key onto the shaft and she was back, apparently to offer more advice on how to do this properly. However, I lucked out. The key slid on perfectly and only when I started to wind up the mainspring, causing a really nasty crunching and grinding sound, did she quickly jump down and scurried off to the rear bedroom. Told you she was a strange cat.

In her defense, she liked to be petted or rubbed, especially on her tummy, was friendly with visiting humans (all except small children with grabby hands – when those came to visit she always disappeared, never to be found until after they had left), and purred while she watched TV or slept in the wife’s lap.

Being a housecat, we tried to get her to go outside and get some exercise walking on a regular basis. She was a little skittish and afraid of everything that moved or made a sound and would duck under bushes, refusing to come out despite our pleas.

At long last I figured out how to make her take a walk, but the story about “the cat and the collar” is another tale. I’ll tell you this, cats do NOT like to wear collars but let’s save that report when I’m in a better mood and these scratches on the backside of my hands have healed over.

Authors note: This was a “Writers’ Cramp” entry originally with the prompt of: Use these words in the story: duct tape, collar, stopped clock, pink balloons and broken key. Word limit was 1000 words. After the contest the story was edited and re-written and the word count jumped to 1338.