The Great Cat Detective: Detective Fuzzy Bottoms and the Feliz Navidad Bandits
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| A very detectival cat |
So, recently, I've been writing a series of detective stories about my friend's cat. The cat's name is Gato, but my friend and her boyfriend call him Detective Fuzzy Bottoms because he's such a detectival cat (I don't know if detectival is a real word, and spell check certainly thinks it isn't, but spellcheck also doesn't recognize a lot of terms from Game of Thrones, so spell check clearly doesn't know what's going on in the world today) and is always investigating something.
As someone once told me, cats don't know it's Christmas (which is pretty profound if you ask me), but I wanted to write a holiday mystery for Detective Fuzzy Bottoms anyway because why not?
Anyway, this is Gato's holiday adventure. It's the third installment in the Detective Fuzzy Bottoms saga. I'll list the other two mysteries below. I don't think you really need to read them in order, but you may want to (in case you're wondering why Gato is a poet or something like that).
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So, of course, I was distressed when my humans started to preform the house tree mystery. I am a cat detective, a poet (my new book of verse, Lines from the Shadow of the Litterbox is available on Amazon on January 3rd), and a summa cum laude graduate of the University of the Royal Meow, but I knew that even I wasn't going to be able to solve the mystery of the house tree. My great-great-grandfather, the poet Fernando Alejandro de los Montes, once wrote a poem called "I Don't Know Why Humans Worship House Trees, But it Disquiets My Soul," and I felt that it described my feelings very well when my humans first carried the house tree into the den.
They immediately set it down and began to cover it in shiny things, even though the tree clearly had a full coat of fur. Humans do not understand that things with fur do not need to wear artificial fur; one of my humans once tried to wrap me in artificial fur, but I scratched her and escaped (I had to file a report about this, but it was decided that it was not police brutality because I scratched her in self defense). Humans wear artificial fur because their fur is so odd and only grows on their heads. Perhaps their head fur is part of the cause of the house tree brain disease.
Of course, I tried to investigate the tree; I was diligently scratching it and looking for clues when one of my humans picked me up and carried me away (I don't like being carried, but I don't want to scratch her again because of all the paperwork).
"No, Gato," she said, setting me down next to Xavi, my partner detective, "the Christmas tree is not a scratching pole."
The second she said this, I knew it was all over. I could scratch everything in the den except for the humans, besides which she had given the tree a name. Clearly brain sickness had set in and she now believed that the tree was a human! I wondered if sitting on her face while she slept would cure her of her terrible ailment.
While I thought, my she human was setting out our dinners. I was glad to see that her malady hadn't made her forget how we liked our Fancy Feast. Xavi and I had worked for months to train our humans to prepare our food properly.
After feeding us, our she human went back to the tree. Of course, Xavi started to bolt down his food immediately, but I waited for a moment, watching as our humans put something large and pointy on top of the tree. I shuddered.
I walked over to my food dish. There was something wrong. My food was gone. Behind my dish, grinning a fateful grin, was a MOUSE. A MOUSE.
In the flesh.
A MOUSE!
And he was holding a sack full of my food!
I got one of my claws out and held it up. "Paws up and no one gets hurt!" I meowed.
Xavi looked up from his food. "What's going on?"
The house held onto the sack full of food with one paw and held up the other paw.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked. "You infamous villain!" I find that it's always best to be dramatic. Being a poet has taught me that.
"I'm a bandit," the mouse said, "my name is Robin Mouse, I steal from the cats to feed the mice."
I guffawed at the mouse. Well, I guffawed in spirit. My vocal cords aren't the right shape for guffawing.
"You didn't steal Xavi's food, why are you doing this to me?"
The mouse narrowed his eyes. "My brother Terry is doing 20 to life in the mousetrap down in El Paso, and your cousin Mr. Fluffykins put him there."
"What's El Paso?" Xavi said.
My cousin, Mr. Fluffykins is also a detective, but he's not a poet like me.
"Fluffykins told me about that case," I said, "he told me your brother left droppings in the oven; that carries a life sentence where I come from. Now, put the food down, and I'll only give you a ticket for entering human dens without a license."
"No way! I'm a hardened criminal," the mouse said. "Feliz Navidad!"
The mouse grabbed his sack of food and made a mad dash for the refrigerator. I tried to pounce on him, but, at the last minute, he dashed into the space between the refrigerator and the stove, and I lost him.
"Why didn't you help me, Xavi?" I demanded angrily. "Why did you let him steal my food?"
"I was eating. Besides, my cousin is a dentist," Xavi said with a shrug. (A note for readers who are not cats. Humans shrug with their shoulders; this is incorrect. Cats shrug by slowly opening and closing their eyes in a way that says "you and your problems are not important." This is the correct way to shrug.)
"Well, what am I supposed to do now?" I demanded, feeling that I was going to have to write a poem about all of this.
Xavi looked at his empty dish. "You can lick my bowl if you want. What do you think Feliz Navidad means?"
I considered this question for a moment. "It means, 'a plague on both your houses.' I learned that at the University."
At that moment, my she human returned to the kitchen. I pawed at my bowl, letting it clatter against the floor loudly.
"Gato," she said, reprovingly, "stop that! I fed you already."
It was no use. She simply could not understand that a Feliz Navidad bandit had stolen all of my food because my cousin had put his brother in prison. Humans are very foolish creatures and cannot understand anything unless you spell it out for them. I think I'll write a poem about the inability of humans to understand such simple things.
The next day, when my human served my breakfast, I spent five whole minutes patrolling the perimeter of the kitchen. I was sure the Feliz Navidad bandit would be back. When I finally got back to my bowl, there was a mouse standing next to it. It was a different mouse, but it was clear he was also a bandit. It was clear because he told me so.
"I'm a bandit," he said, "Joyeux Noël."
The mouse grabbed the food and made a dash to stove.
"What's that mean?" Xavi asked.
I paused, "I think it means, 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.'"
Xavi shook his head, "mice are weird."
I will not attempt to describe the agony of my soul during this time. My humans were infected with house tree sickness, and, each and every day, a bandit would appear to steal my food. Xavi was no help. He was too busy eating.
One day it was "Buon Natale" (which means eat slugs), another day it was "Frohe Weihnachten" (which translates to "something wicked this way comes"). I began to think that I would starve, as many great poets have starved before me (being a starving poet is a very popular career choice). Fortunately, my humans often considerately left extra food in the cupboards and on the table for me, so I wasn't too hungry. They pretended to be angry when they found out that I'd eaten it, but I knew it was just the house tree madness.
I had never doubted my detectival skills before, but I began to doubt them then. How was I supposed to investigate two cases at once? Xavi, of course, was no help. He kept telling me that his cousin the dentist had never put anyone in a mousetrap because he was a dentist, and dentists don't do that sort of thing. I tried to talk to Xavi about the house tree disease, but he wasn't very interested.
"It's nice that the humans have made a new friend," Xavi said when I asked him if he was concerned that the humans thought the tree was a person.
I decided that I was a misunderstood poetical genius and no one could comprehend the depth of my spirit's distress. I didn't even have a ball of yarn to make me feel better (I'll tell you more about the cosmic nature of balls of yarn another time). I was starring gloomily at the house tree, thinking about the great darkness of the universe and that I didn't like the new litter our humans were providing us with and that I'd have to poop under their bed to express my chagrin, when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. It was the Feliz Navidad bandit! The first mouse to steal my food was crossing the floor, hauling a sack full of fancy feast, and heading for a chink in the baseboard.
I knew what I had to do.
I jumped to the floor, but, instead of trying to pounce on him, I began to chase him toward the house tree.
"You'll never catch me!" The bandit shouted. "I fought the law, and I won!"
My detectival instincts did not fail me. Instead of pouncing on the bandit, as he expected me to do, I threw myself at the house tree. It came down with a deafening crash, crushing the bandit.
"Sic semper tyrannis!" Screamed the bandit, just before he was engulfed in a sea of tree fur.
I leapt nimbly off the house tree and began to clean my paws.
My humans came rushing into the room.
"Oh no!" My she human wailed, "what happened to the tree?"
I brightened. She hadn't called it Christmas tree; she wasn't calling the tree by its name, meaning she had realized that it wasn't a person after all. I was sure the humans would be very grateful to me once they realized they were no longer trapped in psychosomatic slavery to a shrub.
Xavi walked up to me, watching our humans pick bits of shiny things off the floor. "What did that mouse say before he was crushed?" He asked.
I thought for a moment. "I think it meant 'Merry Christmas.'"
***
Just sayin'
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