Ditto.
And while Mate and I are stumbling around the house, trying to function with the high level fear and anxiety about the world in flames around us, the following happened.
Squish runs into the living room, hysterical, in tears, screaming, "My cat is EATING A DEAD BIRD!"
Mate is watching television, and I'm like trying to calm her down. I get up and move in front of Mate and calm her down and get to her room and there's her cat, Nebula a.k.a. Nebula Lector, dining on the entrails of a bird doing the iron cross on her new floor.
She's sitting on her bed screaming at the cat for being a psycho and Mate suddenly goes, "Hey, what's going on?" (I swear, it was like a tornado happened and he was trying to figure out if we were talking about The Good Fight because that's what he was paying attention to and why wouldn't we be talking about the same thing in the middle of a frickin' TORNADO!)
"Get a dog poop bag!" I order, just as Geoffie bootie bumps the cat out of the way because apparently they were having Dead Thing Buffet and nobody invited her. I shove her away and then shove the cat away because this bird is the BEST THING EVER to all the animals, and I make sure Squish is okay and we dispose of the sad little poop bag and *whew*. Glad THAT'S over with, right?
Except ten minutes later, we're sitting down again and I'm like, "Is that a bird? Is that a BABY bird?"
Yes folks, you guessed it, the dead bird was the MAMA bird and the cat had gone to get a BABY bird and there was a helpless, featherless, LIVE BABY BIRD on our floor.
And then it was in a box filled with paper towels, sitting on a heating bad, being fed an internet approved concoction of dog food soaked in salt water mashed up with hard boiled egg.
Squish assumed ownership, bless her--maybe she was happy to make amends for the Dead Thing Buffet on her floor. We locked the cats--PLURAL, as in ALL THE CATS--in our room for an hour, because they were like, "Hey, I know that sound. That's a PREY sound, and there is PREY IN THIS HOUSE, and OMG, PEOPLE, it is ON!"
And so far the bird has lived for a whole hour and a half in a box filled with paper towels. If it lives until tomorrow, we'll call bird rescue and see if maybe someone there is up to feeding a baby bird every fifteen to twenty minutes for the rest of their lives, but in the meantime, we're it.
ZoomBoy let the cats out of our room after Squish locked herself and the baby bird in her room, and as he held a wriggling--and totally unrepentant Nebula Lector, I glared that the troublemaker and told him no.
"No! No! You cannot have the snack in the box!"
ZoomBoy put him down and he ran outside, probably to see if there were any more Dead Thing Buffets to be had. If I wake up with a dead bird on my pillow, I'm telling you, I'm checking out of my own head for 24 hours and living on Oreos and pinot grigio because I am done.
God. I know there are bigger, scarier, more unjust and more important things in the world to worry about--but that poor fucking baby bird just about yanked everybody's heart out. ZoomBoy was like, "Hey, at least he's a mighty hunter!" and Mate went, "No! It's not hunting when it's a next of defenseless creatures who have no way to defend themselves and had their parent taken away!"
And I got verklempt too.
Which is, all things considered, probably how we ended up with the snack in the box getting fed glop every fifteen minutes by our despondent offspring.
We can't wave a magic wand and make the world perfect, and we can't tell our friends whom we love, "It's all going to be okay," because we all know better.
But by Goddess, we can feed the snack in the box some glop.
Stay healthy and safe, folks. Find the things that make you happy and feel in control of the world and do your best with them.
And definitely show kindness whenever you can.
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