My cat died yesterday. She escaped when I was taking out the rubbish and, after a prolonged search, I found her in a puddle in the gutter a street over. The short walk home, sobbing, clutching a wet, furry body to my chest, felt like it took about an hour.
Molly was possibly the most irritating cat in the history of the world. Her appearance in my house as a tiny bedraggled kitten, flea-ridden and emaciated, pretty much set the tone for her existence. There was the summer when she brought in a seemingly never-ending series of huge wood pigeons in varying degrees of disembowelment, the night she gave birth to five kittens under the kitchen sink as a mental patient broke into the house, the time she stuck her nose into a tub of hair dye and dyed her face purple, and the many death defying leaps from first floor windows so that I had to knock on assorted neighbours’ doors and beg to retrieve her from their gardens.
All this, and yet, dammit I loved that stupid cat. Ok, so maybe she was wantonly destructive, and attacked half the people who tried to pet her, and maybe she was so thick that she’d happily stand in the litter tray and poo over the side, but how could I fail to love a cat who crawled into my dress to sleep, because that millimetre of fabric was just too far away from me. Who licked the tears from my cheeks when I was sad. Who always wanted to be the big spoon when we snuggled, however uncomfortable it made us both.
RIP Molly. No hunting cherubs, even if they do have wings.
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