The Swamp, the Cat, the Pope

I was going to a friend's house to play a roleplaying game on a sunny weekend afternoon. He wasn't someone I knew very well, though, and he lived in the middle of a small-ish swamp on the outskirts of town. His house was built in an upper crotch of a large tree, and since the swamp was fairly small the best way to get there was to climb to the top of the nearest building and walk a rope bridge about a block to the treehouse.

For some reason I brought my cat along. She's a very loud American Shorthair, black, twelve years old and deaf. She wasn't too concerned about the rope bridge - it was surprisingly stable - but when we got to the treehouse there was still a ladder to climb to get to the doorway. I couldn't hold the cat and climb, and there was a ditzy blond woman in front of me who was making a big show of being afraid of heights, shrieking/giggling and wobbling around. I am/was actually afraid of heights, and I was merely standing on the bridge, holding my cat and wishing she'd get on with it so I wouldn't have to stand there any longer. It was stable but it did sway in the breeze.

After a few minutes, the cat started to squirm. The people in the house yelled out to me, advising me to just let the cat run around outside until it was time to go home. I couldn't do anything else, anyway; she climbed out of my arms and down the tree, where she was promptly eaten by an alligator.

It sounds funny, but it was really horrific at the time. She screamed terribly, like an abandoned baby, while it took her minutes to die. The alligator's first chomp left a hole in her side that oozed blood and somehow seemed to cripple her hind legs. The next bite didn't kill her, but visibly broke her legs and left another tear in her body. There was no question of my being able to rescue her - she was clearly doomed, even if I'd gotten down the tree in time.

I teared up but didn't start crying. I felt like I was about to vomit. My host was horrified as well and I found myself inside his (surprisingly unremarkable) house as he offered me a replacement cat. I declined politely; I wanted to wait a while, not get a new cat five minutes after mine had been killed. He insisted and insisted, and before I knew it I was back at home with two enormous Maine Coons, each about three feet long and a hundred or so pounds.

The cats were in constant motion. I would have expected such a large cat to be laid back, but that wasn't the case. They walked slowly but steadily through the house, their massive bodies undulating over fur, on top of meaty legs. They jumped on the couches and beds and walked across everything.

I thought I should empty the litterbox before they were confused by another cat's scent, but they started using it before I could get to it.

Matie came home and was ecstatic. She was glad that our old cat was dead and we finally had some normal cats. I pointed out that they were really, really big, but she thought that was just fine. They stopped moving around so much, having found places to sleep, so I wasn't too concerned about that. Matie was so happy that Jessie was dead that she told me we needed to give my friend a "thank you" card for the huge new cats and killing our old one. She made me drive us all the way out to Costco to buy the card, since they had better cards there.

When we got to Costco, though, they only had two card options: boxes and boxes of identical bulk cards, and a series of cards that were signed by the Pope. They weren't signed by the Pope right then, they were like Sea Monkeys; you had to write what you wanted the Pope to say on the included notepad and mail the whole thing to the Vatican. The Pope cards were really expensive, about thirty dollars each, but I didn't want to buy four dozen identical "thank you" cards - it was even more expensive that way.

The Pope cards were oversized and die-cut in different outlines. There were only three different ones, though. There was a cartoon of a baby wearing a ladybug costume with a banal-humorous limerick about the Internet inside; it was cut in the shape of the baby, of course. There was a birthday card cut in the shape of a bouquet of flowers, and there was a teddy-bear-shaped card with a very specific message inside congratulating the recipients on their mixed marriage.

We got the ladybug card.