Lucy and I are a like in certain ways, mostly when it comes to food. We both eat ravenously. We both are already thinking about our next meal while still eating the previous meal. On a non-food related note, we both live with the Roommate, which ordinarily might cause us to bond, but there are a lot of cyclical patterns of codependency encircling our apartment that sort of gets in the way of that.
Another non-food related item that Lucy and I have in common is that we are both early risers. On second thought, however, this is still food-related, since we are early risers because our stomachs wake us up. My stomach would not be a reliable alarm clock. I never know: will it wake me up at 4:30AM? 5:00? 6:17? No matter, Lucy is already waiting outside my bedroom door like the conniving codependent lunatic she is. I don't know how many more hundreds of mornings it will take for her to figure out that I AM NOT THE ONE WHO FEEDS HER IN THE MORNING and I never will be. Despite Lucy's brainlessness, however, I relish those quiet morning moments when the sky is still dark and Mommy is still sleeping. I love my morning coffee, my moments to sit serenely... And I especially love that The Roommate sleeps like a rock, because it means that during the mornings there is nothing standing in the way between me and Lucy except unbridled discipline, cajoling and whatever other mindgames I can come up with to bludgeon that cat into being a normal member of the feline species.
But this morning I didn't even remember to get The Spraybottle out, because Lucy seemed to be exhibiting a rare moment of sane lucidity (pun intended, though the actual etymological connection between the name Lucy and the word lucidity is nonexistent; Lucy is about as mentally opaque as you can get). Rather, I sat with my coffee at the kitchenette table, our cozy little electric oil lamp burning in the corner, enjoying the soft glow it cast upon our hardwood dining area and the delicious homemade cookies The Roommate had left out just for me. Several minutes passed before I realized I hadn't heard much out of Lucy that morning--no mooing, no grazing or cud chewing, no lapping water out of the trough (toilet). She was just sitting quietly at me feet--how sweet.
False. How idiotic. I suddenly realized she was quiet because she was so busy moving her head continuously in rapid circular motions. Her eyes were getting bigger and more crazed by the moment. It's happening, I thought. Lucy has actually gone and gotten herself possessed. She is going to try to turn her head backwards like that girl does in the Exorcist. It really freaked me out, because as much as I joke about the whole Lucifer thing, we all know Lucy is not actually intelligent enough to qualify as certifiably demonic. And if I really were living with a minion of satan, I think I would like to review the terms of The Custody Agreement that I agreed upon with The Roommate many moons prior.
What a relief when I realized the huge monster fly circling the ceiling light in the kitchen. I went back to writing in my journal, sipping my coffee and devouring The Roommate's baking conquests. Now, you have to know that when it comes to Lucy's mental and cognitive hindrances, bug-hunting is surprisingly NOT one of them. In her heydey, Lucy was known as the best cockroach hunter on this side of the Cincinnati-Northern-Kentucky-Metro. Indeed she comes from a long line of excellent cockroach hunters, or at least as far back into her lineage as we have been able to deduce via ancestry.com (we've gone all the way back through her mother, who was a rabid stray that the Roommate developed a love interest in). But Lucy is, shall we say, past her prime--ever since she tripled her body weight and developed the symptoms of borderline diabetes. In real years, Lucy is four. In cat years, she is 32. In anatomical years, though, she is like 99.9 years old. If you ask me, she's living in the past, thinking she can catch bugs again. If it were me, I think I'd want to tackle the underlying problem. There will always be bugs to hunt down, Lucy. But how are you going to be able to catch them if you die of diabetes in what should be the prime of your life? Not that I would care, mind you.
Anyway. Minutes went buy, and still no bug lay at my feet. I looked down at Lucy, her head was absolutely still. The bug had landed directly on the light, and it appeared Lucy was staring (or rather squinting) it down. Now, one thing that I find really appreciable about my personality is that I'll try anything once. So I followed her gaze and stared directly at the light, too, that is until I realized after about .075 seconds that staring directly at a bright light source feels like a hole being seared through my retinas. What took me less than one fraction of a second to realize, however, took Lucy about three minutes to master--after which she blinked very emphatically and looked around her, before shaking her head and twitching her whiskers. She stared in disbelief at the world around her, as though waking from a dream of light and being thrust into the reality of darkness. I watched as about three of the five phases of grief flashed across her cat face, and realized almost before she did what was about to happening. Lucy, No! I thought. Sure enough, she was a goner. Unable to deal with the brisk reality of the disenchanted, blinding-light-less reality of her circumstances, she gave in to the light once more. Her eyes darted back up to the fly, where they stayed for approximately five entire minutes.
When these five minutes passed, Lucy again shook her head in disbelief at the rest of the kitchen. She sat in a blinded stupor for a while before trying to walk, whereupon she ran headlong into the refrigerator. Whether this was an act of blindness or a suicide attempt, I'll never know. For the remainder of the morning, Lucy slept off her scorched pupils on the couch.
The fly will live another day.
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