A Cat Named "Kitty"

A CAT NAMED “KITTY”
I never liked cats. I always had the feeling that if I accidently fell asleep around a cat that it would eat my face. They just seemed untrustworthy, devious and evil, like a bad woman. All their purring and rubbing against me was just a cheap ploy to make me think they loved me true. But that was before I met “Kitty.”
Kitty is a little orange feral cat that just showed up crying at my place in the country one day. Other feral cats have wandered through here, but they always ran like hell when they saw me. Not so Kitty. She wouldn’t come up on the porch to me as I called to her, but she kept meandering around the house and yard and coming back, talking the whole time. She came back the next day, and the day after that, so I decided to cut hot dogs into pieces and put them on the steps leading up onto my porch. A couple of days of this and Kitty was up on the porch.
She slowly allowed me to pet her and started to cautiously rub up against me. She wouldn’t let me hold or pick her up yet and, sensing a trap, there was no way she wanted to come in the house. I tried some spaghetti leftovers on her and she wolfed those down. I eat a lot of spaghetti with different strange ingredients each time I make it and Kitty savored each variety, teaching me that cats will eat onions, corn, beans, pineapple, cheese, sausage and most everything else.
My suspicion that cats don’t really love you began to weaken. Kitty liked rubbing against me and being petted more than she liked food. She’d eat a little bite then come over to me for some love, then go back for another bite. If a friend came over, she’d head for the hills, peeking out of various hiding places to see if they were gone yet. She likes no one but me, and I find this appealing.
One day, Kitty went away and didn’t come back for a week. I think in Australia they call this a “walkabout.” I was worried, but since we had an open relationship, I just figured she had found a better offer or went off to get laid. Anyway, she came back looking kinda sad and depressed, so I guessed I was the best she could do. Some time later, I went on my own walkabout to New York for two weeks, leaving Kitty plenty of food and water on the porch. When I returned, she looked fine and was happy to see me. I don’t think Kitty is vindictive.
One problem with leaving Kitty is that my local possums (Larry, Curly and Moe) will eat all the food. One night I caught them on the porch. Kitty was sitting in a chair and casually watching them steal her food as if she was saying, “Oh yeah, I know those three bums, see ‘em every night…” I turned on the light and yelled at them, but they refused to move and looked at me, like, HEY, BRING IT ON! (Or, HEY, I’M TOO DUMB TO BE AFRAID!). I suppose nocturnal creatures all run into each other at one time or another, unless somebody can eat somebody else.
Some days Kitty didn’t seem so hungry, so I suspected she was supplementing the cat food I had started to buy. I knew this for sure when one day I heard a horrible crunching sound and spotted her chomping on a mouse. After the skull and bones were reduced to pap, she swallowed the thing whole. Later a big fur ball was puked up that looked just like that mouse. Another time she got out of my lap leaving a batch of bird feathers on me…highly suspicious.
Today, Kitty has graduated to sleeping in my bed at night and wanting to cuddle when she feels or hears me stir. I still can’t pick her up without a fight, but we are working on that in case someday she needs to go to a vet. They say a feral cat cannot be tamed unless it has had some kind of human contact early on. I don’t know Kitty’s history, but I choose to think that I am a great lion tamer and have pulled off the impossible. I Googled pictures of cat’s asses and am reasonably sure she is female. Whether or not she is fixed, I have no idea…guess I’ll find out…and an oily-looking grey cat that I’ve named Elvis has been hanging around. We all know what HE wants!
I bought a litter box, but Kitty doesn’t like the look of it. Even so, she’s only crapped in the house once, and that may just have been an emergency and a bad reaction to a foul rodent.
Relationships are difficult, but Kitty and I are working through our “stuff.” She has a bad temper and wants to fight viciously when on her back, but forgives easily. I don’t like tiny claws kneading on me to show affection, but maybe someday she’ll realize this. She is bold and ballsy, venturing out on shaky twigs or zooming to the tops of tall trees. I’m a life-long dog lover because they come when you call them and want to be with you all the time…but so does Kitty! She’s different than all those other cats.