Mom comes home from shopping. Since she still owes me a truckload of treats, I sniff the bags as best I can – I don’t table-surf like Catie and there’s a limit to how high I can lift my nose but it’s all good because I have superpower nostrils. I don’t smell anything interesting. Mom is enthralled however with all her goodies and she carefully lines a series of small packages on the table. Then she puts on her funny-looking facial apparatus that makes her eyes look scary huge.
“Hm. Why do they make the print so small,” she says. She turns a pink box over and over and squints at some microscopic markings on the back. She notices that Catie and I are watching her and mistakes my apprehension for curiosity – her eyes look like that guy in that horror movie The Fly and it’s creeping me out. She feels compelled to explain. “These are beauty products. And this…” she squints some more. It’s not a good look. “..is a hair removal kit.”
That sounds seriously wrong. I look at Catie, who still has these funny naked patches on her front leg and both her back ones. I look at the box Mom is holding in her hand. Aha. I make the connection and slink off to a safe corner where Catie and I hide all our fur balls from Mom. Catie’s too lazy to be concerned and flops down on her pillow while Mom disappears upstairs.
Just as I start to relax, there’s some commotion from the room with the flushable water bowl.
Mom comes back downstairs. She’s wearing her bath robe and she’s got the pink box crushed in her hand. She shoves the package in the garbage can and stares at it for a moment. “That really hurt,” she says. She has some funny red patches all over her legs.
For a species that prides itself on its intelligence, I’ll never understand humans. I certainly don’t understand mom’s obsession with grooming. Maybe it’s just her. Dad’s not nearly as worried about it all – in fact, one time he was sitting at the table reading the paper and something caught Mom’s attention. “You have an eyebrow hair that’s four inches long,” she said to him. “Stay right there.”
When Mom says stay, everyone but Catie listens.
Now, my dad’s usually a tough dude like me; but when Mom came back with some tweezers and yanked on that eyebrow whisker, he cried like a baby.
Mom blames the disappearance of Catie’s whiskers on some chemo treatments. Hmm. I’m just not too sure any more so Catie and I are going undercover to put the pieces together. The truth might not be pretty.
