The Howling

So we tend to have a myriad of cats sleeping up on the bed with us at night. Healy is almost always there, Nelson comes up a lot (and believe me, when that cat crawls into bed, he takes up a ton of room), and Pearl shows up now and again (although usually she sleeps with Abra). At times we'll have two or even three cats scattered around the bed while we are sleeping. (Tango, the Queen of Mean, sleeps in her own room downstairs...)

Suffice to say, I've gotten pretty used to sleeping with cats. Healy will often sleep curled up on my chest, in fact, while Nelson will jam up against me and try and shove me over so he has more room. (Brenna does that, too, but that's a different issue.) Anyway, it's cozy, but we all get along for the most part.

Until this week.

A few nights ago, Nelson was wandering around on the bed, and woke me up. He jumped up on my tummy (oof!) and sat there for a minute. But then... the dog moved and this startled Nelson so badly that he bolted off me at top speed. Now a 20 pound cat going from 0 to 60 in 0.3 seconds needs some serious traction to get going. He found that traction, unfortunately, on my stomach. Ouch:



A perfect imprint of a large cat's hind claw. In fact, there is a mirror imprint on the other side of my stomach from the other hind claw, but since women and children read this blog, I'll spare you a picture of my entire naked stomach. (Being half-Greek, there is a good bit of hair there, of course. As an aside, we were driving past a parking structure the other day that had dark vines growing all over a big white wall, and Abra yelled out "that looks like Daddy's tummy!".)

But you know, Nelson's a sweetheart of a cat, and is really good natured, and really was startled by that awful ferocious dog, and that's the first time anything like that has happened, so I chalk it up to bad luck and that's that.

Until Thursday night. Now in this case, I was in a deep sleep and have no idea what happened. I just woke up with a flash of hot pain on my arm, touched it, and felt blood. I looked around, and there are three cats sitting in various places in the room, all staring at me expressionlessly: What's your problem, dude? In the morning, when the lights are on, I find this on my arm:


Sigh. And this time, I can't even figure out which cat to yell at. The claw marks are smaller, and more likely to match Healy or Pearl. But a long scratch is not Pearl's style, she's more of a poker. Healy, the best tabby cat in the world, would never scratch his beloved master, would he? And Nelson of course has now demonstrated a taste for blood, so I can't rule him out either.

What I think happened is that there was a cat chase going on, and someone ran across the bed, slid across my arm, and had to dig in to keep their balance...

So now I live in fear at night. What will happen? Who is out to get me? When will they strike next? And each morning I have to run a quick inspection to see if there's anything new. It's like I'm living in my own personal horror movie.

Tonight maybe I'll hide some tuna fish under Brenna's pillow and see if the evil beasts will transfer their "affections" on to her instead...