Ok, crisis averted. I am not even sure how to go about explaining it, but we had to kill the cat. She just lost it. All evening she had us at knife point talking about how we have been "keeping her down" and persecuting her religion. It was nuts. I had never heard some of the stuff she was saying...hell, I did not even know our cat could talk. I still don't quite understand it all, but I will try and go through what I can remember. I am still a little shaken up, so bear with me.
It all started when I was walking to the bedroom from the kitchen. It was probably around 6-6:30pm. We had just eaten some terrible pasta and I was going into the bedroom to hide from the embarassment of fixing the meal. Then I saw the cat standing in the doorway just staring at the ceiling. She was completely nonplussed that I was as close as I was and that I almost walked right into her. She did not even seem to notice I was there. She just had this expectant and blissful look on her face. The concentration she showed kinda startled me at first, so I just stared for a second, then I looked up to see what was looking at. Nothing.
Then I heard it, a shuffling in the ceiling. We have a hanging ceiling and there is about a foot drop from the actual physical ceiling to what we see when we look up. I flipped on the hallway light, and there it was again...the shuffling. I looked down to see the cat still stone still, but her head now facing where the sound had died.
I yelled to the wife, and soon we figured out it was a pigeon. It must have gotten in through the vents on the side of the building and got stuck up there. We had a few minutes of debating on how to handle it. We ended up nailing a blanket over the living room door, shutting the rest of the apartment up, opening the front door, popping a ceiling tile open, and coaxing the bird out.
There was much relief with the bird gone. We started putting everything back in their natural order, and Kitty just flipped. In no time at all she had us in the bedroom, tied to our chairs, and gagged. She bit through the phone line cutting us off from the outside world. Then she just started pacing back and forth on the floor, periodically looking one of us in the eye, pulling her knife out, and then slowly putting it away.
She paced for what seemed like hours, then she stopped and started screaming at us about how we had persecuted her religion long enough, and the pigeon was the last straw. Apparently, according to Kitty, she had prayed long and hard to the cat gods for forgiveness. Since we vile humans refused to let her go outside she was unable to go on her nightly hunting pilgrimages, she asked them for a way to bring the hunt to her so that she could prove herself and ensure her way into cat heaven. She went on to say that when we locked her up so that we could free the pigeon, we had commited the ultimate sin by going against her faith and her gods and that in place of the pigeon, we must be sacrificed to her gods.
An eternity had passed since she began her rant, and then with the sound of steel hitting air as she drew her knife, there was nothing. All that was left was our maniacal little Kitty holding a knife trying to figure out which she would sacrifice first. She turned to Erin and starting laughing as she raised the knife and started to walk closer to her.
Everything was so fast that I am not sure how it happened, but somehow as Kitty was making her first slash, Erin managed to twist in such a way that Kitty slashed through the ropes binding her arms. Unfortunatly, she also go a deep gash down her right arm, but she must have had enough adrenaline going to ignore the pain. She slamed Kitty out of the room and managed to shut and lock the door behind her. She untied the ropes on her legs and then freed me. I managed to bandage up Erin's arm, but I really needed to get her to the hospital. The whole time Kitty was jumping at the door trying to break the glass.
Living on the second story there was no way we were getting out the window, and Kitty was blocking our only exit. Since Kitty had cut the phone line there was no way to call anyone for help. Finally, I broke out a screen on the window and started tossing stuff at the neighbors window to get their attention. After a few minutes, I got them and they agreed to call the cops and an ambulance. After that it was all waiting to see who would come first: Kitty or the police.
The police were there in no time at all. They busted in only to see Kitty flying at them in a rage. The first cop went down quick, a knife to the eye and three long claw marks on each cheek when she launched from his face to the next cop and out of our view. We heard a scream followed by two gunshots and a tumbling of something falling down the stairs. Then silence.
We waited for a few minutes before going out to see what had happened. Kitty was dead at the top of the stairs and the second police officer was at the bottom of the stairs clutching his side. The ambulance people got there right as we got down to him. Three of his ribs and his leg were broken in the fall, but the medics said he would probably be ok. As they were loading him up to take him to the hospital, he told me that Kitty had knocked him off balance towards the stairs when she leapt at him from the first officer, but he managed to get off two shots as he was falling. He apologized for killing her, but said he was happy we were safe. I did not have the heart to tell him that his partner was dead on my doorstep. I am sure he knew but was being brave.
We got into the car following the ambulance to take Erin to the emergency room while other cops filled the scene. The drive was silent. They made quick work of her arm. Twelve stitches, a lot of gauze for the bleeding, and some mild pain killers in case she needed them, but they doubted it. The drive back was likewise silent. Then the police report, which luckily went quickly, and now, nothing.
What I don't understand about all of this, well, ok, there are a lot of things I don't understand, but mostly, why the fuck didn't she just tell us what we were doing? I mean, since she could talk and all, why not just tell us and no one would have gotten hurt. We would have been happy to accommodate her. I mean, me and the wife respect each other and we both have different belief systems; we would have been fine with hers. Now, I just want to cry every time I see her food dish.
