A short story about a demon cat
When one feral feline upends your life in an instant...
Hello.
I hope your Wednesday is going well. I’m sad to say, but mine is not. Sorry for the lack of contact, but I’ve been busy. I haven’t been doing my usual things, like watching cool TV shows, listening to great music, catching up on excellent movies, then compiling all of my thoughts into newsletters that land in your inbox twice a week.
There’s no time for that. What’s been keeping me busy? Dettol, mostly. I’ve gotten very familiar with the smell of that, and many other cleaning products, over the past 10 days.
So today, I won’t be talking about the new Ratchet & Clank game, Rift Apart, which you should definitely beg, borrow, or steal, so you can play it. Nor will I be discussing the new Wolf Alice album, Blue Weekend, which you should totally give a spin. And I won’t mention the iMax building either - my big update on that will land in your inbox tomorrow.
Instead, we’re going to talk about cats, those mini-lions that the internet adores. In particular, we’re going to discuss one feral devil that has turned our lives upside-down.
Let’s go….
We were away for three nights. A long weekend getaway. We waited until Saturday to skip Auckland’s traffic queues, and drove to Tauranga. We listened to podcasts on the way.
When we got there, we did holiday stuff. We took the kids to the local hot pools. We climbed Mount Maunganui in misty rain. We put salami and mozzarella on sourdough bases and burnt them in a brand new pizza oven. They were crunchy, but delicious.
All in all, it was a good holiday, a recharging of the batteries, a break from the daily grind.
Then we got home.
“What’s that smell?” asked my wife, moments after we unlocked the front door and stepped inside. “Dunno,” I replied. “Smells a bit musty. Let’s open some windows.”
We unpacked, made some snacks, sat down, gathered our bearings, and tried to decide on what to cook for dinner. It was then we realised something was horribly wrong.
That unmistakable, sickly sweet stench of cat piss hit us. It hit hard. Once we’d worked out what it was, we couldn’t escape it. It was overpowering. It was everywhere. In the porch. Wafting down the corridor. In the lounge, the bathroom and each of the bedrooms.
We quickly worked out what had happened: a feral tom cat had come in through the cat door and treated our house like its own personal urinal. It marked its territory. It acted like it owned the place.
Well, this sucks, but we can handle it, we reasoned. We got the Dettol out. We had no idea what we were up against.
For two days, we cleaned. Scrubbing became our full time job. We washed beds, walls, and carpets. We took piles of clothes, sheets, duvets and pillows to a local laundromat for multiple hot water washes. We searched Google, and abandoned the Dettol for baking soda and vinegar. We scrubbed the beds, walls and carpets a second time. We put everything out in the sun to dry. We went to bed with sore arms and headaches.
None of it made a difference. In the morning, our house still stank of cat piss. My daughter couldn’t use her bedroom. We bunked her in with her brother, and called a carpet cleaner. Our carpet is brand new, just three months old. Darren had some bad news. “It doesn’t come out,” he warned us. “You’ll probably still be able to smell it.” He was right. Once the carpets were dry, the smell came back. Somehow, it seemed worse than before.
Like forensic urine splatter analysts, we got down on our hands and knees and began sniffing, piecing together the crime. This tom cat started at the cat door. His first stop was the hallway, where it sprayed all over the door to our lounge. That was crime scene No. 1. Next, it turned right, headed down the hallway, and sprayed on a corner doorframe. No. 2. Then it entered the bathroom, spraying over a cabinet, wall and scales. No. 3. We felt like Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective.
But that casual splatter pattern was just the warm-up. Our nemesis saved the best for last. This hulking beast of a fanged demon cat, which is how I picture it, really went to town in our daughter’s bedroom. What happened in there is wild.
First, it sprayed over an elephant-shaped stool, a recent and much-loved birthday present. It sprayed the elephant’s butt, which seems apt? Then it sprayed over a wardrobe door. It took particular delight in ruining her bed, spraying what seemed like the entire length of it, getting duvets, books, toys and pillows in the process. You can see the spray pattern across the metal trundler underneath her bed. It’s eaten into the metal. Now it’s a fucking Xenomorph from Aliens.
Finally, it sprayed all over my daughter’s new dresser, where it dripped inside the drawers and onto her clothes. That’s when it became personal. My daughter, who is seven years old, cried when I told her this. Seeing those tears made me vow revenge.
Our scene examination finished, our nasal passages destroyed forever, we finally realised what kind of monster we were facing. A feral demon cat, one hellbent on soaking our house in the contents of its acidic bladder, not stopping until everything was ruined. Five days of scrubbing and all the cleaning products in the world didn’t touch it. Wouldn’t come close. Useless.
Defeated, we sealed the room up, called our insurance company, and lodged a claim. All of my daughter’s furniture is getting chucked in a skip. The carpet’s being replaced. They’re sending a builder around today to see if the gib needs to be cut out. The gib! This fucking asshole cat!
Honestly, who knew a small furry thing was capable of this kind of damage. I’ve heard of puppies chewing through power cords, but this feline terrorist took just a few casual minutes to cause thousands of dollars of damage, just because it couldn’t find a damned toilet. For the record, there’s a patch of grass right outside the cat door. It could have just gone there.
I should mention that, like the rest of the internet, I love cats. Our entire family adores them. Our beloved pet Smitten, now 20 years old and partially deaf, was home when all of this happened. She’s super-cool. She still gets zoomies on the reg. She complains when we go to bed because she just wants to stay up all night and party. She’s part of the family. She’s awesome.
It’s moments like these I wish Smitten could talk, to tell us what happened when a demon feline invaded our house and upended our lives.
But she can’t. She’s just a cat.
Normal Boiler Room transmissions will resume tomorrow.
Oh my god.
Dude, get a microchip cat flap!