Now this—this is a scary cat:
In this photo, Marie is expressing her extreme displeasure about my running the sweeper while she's trying to nap. I have as little as possible to do with this cat. She terrifies me. Last summer, she bit me in the hand because a June-bug landed on her head while we were lounging on the front porch. She believes, apparently, that I am directly responsible for the June-bug touching her—after all, it was my shoddy construction of the screened porch that allowed a gap large enough for a June-bug to pass through. So she bit me. And I took antibiotics for a week. You may have noticed in the photos of the kitchen that there's no flap on the cat door. That's because Marie didn't like it touching her when she went through it, so I took it off. It was either remove it or listen to her yowling and attacking the cat door while I'm trying to sleep. Marie lives in the box springs of my bed surrounded by her collection of ponytail holders, bottle caps, pennies, and bread-wrapper ties and comes out only to eat, visit the litterbox, and terrorize the other cats and me. I discovered her lair when I up-ended the box springs to move it to another room and heard her treasures clattering down. Then I saw the gigantic hole she ripped in the fabric of the box springs. I would duct-tape it shut, but I'm afraid she'll kill me. I have not yet put up the Christmas trees because she's claimed one of them as her territory. She tore open the box and crawled in amongst the branches. When I lifted the lid of the box, her eyes glinted at me and she hissed. She was curled up in there like a rattlesnake. I shut the box. Maybe I don't really need a Christmas tree in the dining room. Once, she tempted my neighbor Carl into reaching out to pet her. "Oh, what a pretty cat," he said. Marie doubled in size like a puffer-fish and ran sideways on three legs while trying to claw Carl with one of her front paws. "That is not a nice cat," Carl remarked. No, that is not a nice cat. Not at all.