The Tale of Our Pen Killing Kitty

Both Vince and I woke up a little bleary-eyed this morning. Not because we had a wild night out on the town or anything, although we did stay up rather late watching an episode of “Bloodline” on Netflix. (Good series, by the way!)

No, the real reason for our lack of energy this morning was due to our killer kitty, Twinks, who has developed a penchant for “killing” ballpoint pens.  All manner of writing implements, really. This is good practice in the event there is ever a ballpoint pen uprising in our household, but I think the possibility is somewhat remote.

You’d think our killer kitty would prefer being outside stalking creatures smaller than she, say of the chipmunk or squirrel variety, but I’m not so sure that’s true.

Why?  Because whenever there is a bug or ant in our house that needs to be “handled,” she merely looks at it with a sniff of disinterest and goes on with the more important tasks of her day. Namely, grooming, napping or yakking up a hairball.

But just wait until we finish our evening pre-bed ritual and finally click off the light, give us about a half hour to j-u-s-t settle into that drifting off to sleep deliciousness, and Twinks will start up with a meowing so insistent, it’s like Lassie barking to tell us Timmy’s in trouble and may have fallen into the well.

Egad.

I, personally, can simply roll over onto my “good ear,” and ignore her, but to Vince, the sound is like fingernails on a chalkboard. And this is precisely the time when he decides our cats belong solely to me. Vince refuses to (a) change cat litter, (b) clean up kitty barf, and (c) get out of bed to investigate the latest Twinks “kill.”  (Please note that if ever a Twinks kill involves anything in the rodent category, he WILL be the one to handle that little chore!)

She only stops meowing when I finally go downstairs to investigate and discover her latest, er, victim.  Last night it was an Ultra Fine Point Sharpie.  Twinks was evidently proud of having bagged the Sharpie since she even put her paw on top of it as if to stop me from picking it up.

My habit has been to bring the fallen pen upstairs and place it on top of my dresser, which is the one piece of furniture I haven’t seen Twinks attempt to climb. The pile of pens got to be so mountainous, though, I finally put a pen cup on there. But even that has become rather full lately.

This nightly caterwauling has gotten so bad, I’ve recently added a task to my evening routine, which is to walk around the house searching for stray pens that we’ve taken out but have forgotten to put back in their proper drawers. And I make sure to close the drawers firmly once I put away the pens because I wouldn’t put it past little Miss Twinks to use that slight opening to paw open the drawer so she can go on a pen-killing spree.

Yet despite my attempts at removing all writing implements from kitty access, she somehow manages to find a new one every night.

Smart cat, dumb human? Perhaps. But I’m hoping I’ve managed to crack the case.

This morning I was downstairs cleaning out the wastebaskets and, out of the corner of my eye, I watched her leap from the chair to the desk to the table where I have a large collection of pens that I thought were surely out of her reach.  Guess not, since she pulled one out of the container with her mouth and dropped it on the floor.

Aha! I thought. Her diabolical plan is to let it lie there all day and ignore it – until late this evening after we’ve gone to bed when she will carry it to the stairs and start her meowing. 

So later today when she was catnapping (which is cat speak for “basically all day long”) I snuck downstairs and picked up tonight’s “victim” and put it back in the box. And then put the box in the closet. And firmly shut the door.

So we’re keeping our fingers crossed for a full night of restful sleep without a Twinks Pen Killing Incident.

But in the event she has another stash somewhere, we're planning to wear ear plugs tonight. Just in case.