My cat just threw up on my bedroom floor…
I don’t need to see the evidence. I’ve heard the telltale echoes far too many times to pretend not to know what’s going on. It’s always the same – bastard comes in from a day of being outside and chows down too fast that it upsets his prissy little stomach. Then it takes about 10 minutes of upset, and his body begins the rejection sequence. It starts with vocalizations – Hyurk – Hyurk – Hyurk, that sound eerily similar to us Homo sapiens when we are wrong-waying our undesirables out of our stomach, too. The pulsating rhythms accelerate: HyurkHyurkHyurkHyurk – and then comes the money shot – a longer, drawn-out note, like at the climax of a good minuet – Hyuuuuuuuurrrk! And then a splatter, as if Slimer just materialized on my floor.
I know if I go over there and look I’ll find a pile, mostly dry, of pellet-like substance. Mostly dry because the pellets have absorbed some of the stomach acids, but not so much that they start disintegrating, so they’ll still have most of their shape. Based on the juiciness of the splat, too, I know there will be a moderate amount of liquid associated, sliding down the whole grain-meat-and-vegetable-infused mountain in slow rivulets, pooling gracefully on the floor. I often give such a performance a few minutes to congeal slightly in the air, evaporating off just a bit of that excess moisture, before I clean it up. I find this is a much more appealing option, as the times when I have rushed immediately tot scene, like a Bounty paper towel commercial, I simply end up pushing the mess around more often than I do wipe it up on the first try.
So, congratulations, cat, you just made my night. You gave me something unique to write about – how to describe vomit in an interesting, appealing mind-image way. I wouldn’t expect any less of you.
Stephan Writes 