On this blog, we normally like to talk about furry cuteness and loving human beans and vegan cheese.

But today, I’m going to type a sentence I never thought I’d write here: the following post contains graphic images that may not be appropriate for all audiences.

It was a dark and stormy night cool November morning in the great metropolis of Ringoes. Cats were sleeping. Cats were playing. Cats were yowling for breakfast and love. Human beans were doing their best to deliver the aforementioned with all deliberate speed.

Uber-Associate Karina was working that fateful morning, and it fell to her to feed and medicate Suite C. (Key note: that’s Karina without a t. Karina = Tabby’s Place human bean, Katrina = Tabby’s Place cat. This will be important later.) Although it had been a rough neighborhood in eras past (cough, Tiny, cough), Suite C has gone through a kind of renewal in the last few months. Now the domain of mostly-mellow cats, even the presence of a hurricane and a big-kidneyed bruiser hasn’t generated much violent crime.

Or rather, it hadn’t.

What has been seen cannot be unseen, and I know Karina wishes her gaze had never landed in Suite C. Simply stated…there was blood.

Everywhere.

Across the floor. In the litter boxes. On the cubbies. In the blankets. This was no dribbly line of drops, but a gruesome, ghastly, call-in-Dexter-for-an-analysis gorefest. I give Karina enormous credit for keeping it together, because the odds are high that I would have keeled over and become the next victim of…well, of whatever the heck was going on in Suite C.

After picking her jaw off the floor and her heart out of her stomach, Karina became single-minded in her goal: find the suffering soul who’d left the trail of woe. Precious was fine. No problem with sisters Star or Venice or any of the other 243 black cats in the suite. The suite’s only boys, Milo and Mango, seemed unhurt. No random cat limbs or tails could be found. The head-count was almost finished…

…but where was the suite’s newest wild child, Katrina?

When Karina found her, the hemhorraging hurricane was surprisingly calm for a cat who’d lost roughly 96,000 gallons of blood. Tucked into a soft, now blood-spattered bed, Katrina welcomed Karina’s attention. What Karina found next curdled her own blood. It was…well, I’ll let the appalling picture tell the story.

That is what a cat bite can do.

Katrina was remarkably unconcerned with her injury, perhaps trying to downplay it so as to maintain her rough reputation. After all, it’s got to be embarrassing for a cat like Katrina to take such a hit to the, um, posterior. The way CSI: Ringoes (also known as Jonathan) reconstructs it, Katrina must have finally gone too far and tangled with the wrong cat. When her antagonist opted to fight back, it was more than Katrina had bargained for, so she turned tail and fled…er, attempted to flee. As she did so, she was given that bloody, horrible, bloody-horrible souvenir of a deep bite.

Today Suite C is clean and again G-rated. Katrina took a brief trip to the emergency vet to have her wound cleaned and drained. She’s going to be just fine; the drama’s all over now, except for the embarrassment of wearing a satellite dish around her neck. Understandably, Katrina’s a combo of mortified and massively-twerked-off. But she’ll be okay.

So the question remains: who is the perp in all of this? We ordered a lineup, but Katrina wasn’t talking. Some folks (who shall remain anonymous, but whose names may or may not rhyme with Flanielle) are pointing the finger at Mango. Since I occasionally have the intelligence of a toadstool, I attempted to defend Mango by crowing, “but he’s declawed!”

Right. Because that means he’s not able to bite. Didn’t you know cats’ teeth are located in their claws? Swift, Angela. (And then there’s the fact that declawed cats are often more likely to bite than their unmutilated counterparts. But I digress.)

Still, my money’s on the gnarly guy who’s been mellow just long enough to make us forget he can be a fighter. Mmm-hmm: Milo.

But we have to accept that, barring a tearful confession, we’ll never really know for sure. (I can see it now: Milo finally gets adopted, and as he’s leaving Tabby’s Place with his new family for the last time, he throws himself to the front of his carrier and shrieks, “STOP! It’s killing me! I did it! I must pay for my crime!”) Who knows? Maybe things are different overnight, and the fighting feline was someone we’d never expect.

Little Star? Fragile Precious? Pint-sized Hootz?

Only Katrina knows…

Tags: hootz, katrina, mango, milo, precious, star, venice

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