I never even wanted a pet. I’ve spent the last fourteen years of my life running the reception desk at an animal hospital, and do you know what that means? It means I can give you eleventy billion real-life reasons why letting a dog or cat take up residence in the shadowy corners of your home (scratching up your children, vomiting in your shoes, caterwauling all hours of the goddamn night) is a bad fucking idea. Right now, while I’m in Detroit drinking my very first Faygo in a sunny loft overlooking the river and glaring at people enjoying themselves below, my feline companion, Helen, is in Chicago, probably definitely pressing her moist butthole against all the clean surfaces in my apartment. She is a pig demon from hell, sent to my life as payback for all the vicious thought-crimes I have committed against people who listen to music on the bus without headphones. People who keep loose change in their actual pockets. People who host sit-down dinner parties in their young, marginally-successful-person apartments.
Seven years ago, Ken, one of the vets at the animal hospital, rolled into work with a shoe box tucked under his arm. Inside was a shivering, hairy ball of mucus the size of a child’s fist. It was a baby cat, crawling with fleas and too small to even really have eyes, and the high-pitched screeching sounds it was making made me want to cut my own throat. I ignored it. I was standing in the kennel washing out my breakfast dishes in the dog tub and would be having no part of that mewling lump of roundworms and giardia. It was too small and slimy and gross to do anything: feed itself, pee on its own, look even remotely adorable. “Aw, it’s too bad that rat is going to die,” I muttered to myself as Lori, the head technician, gently placed it into an incubator. Then I went into the break room to make my oatmeal. I am not ordinarily immune to the charms of a cutie-pie kitten with its itty-bitty whiskers and teeny-tiny nose, but the minute Ken walked by, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and told me that something was up with that repulsive thing. It had the mark of the beast.
Helen’s mother was a local stray that kept averting capture and was often spotted roaming the hood with a belly full of kids. Apparently she realized that she had just given birth under a neighboring porch to an infant prince of darkness and decided to bounce, taking her healthy, non-Antichrist kittens with her to a safe house down the block. Ken’s neighbor found Helen huddled near his steps, and, remembering he had a veterinarian on his street, rushed her over, wrapped in an old towel, and begged Ken to save her. Never one to panic, my man set her up in the garage away from his curious dogs and hoped she’d be alive the next morning so he could bring her into work and get her on some life support.
A week later, that disgusting garbagemonster was still hanging on. She, as we eventually discovered when her body started to take recognizable shape, was pretty resilient. She drank ravenously from her bottle before passing out milk drunk on a heating pad, KMR infant cat formula leaking from the corners of her mouth, her eyes still gooey slits too premature to open all the way. Technicians would hold her over the trash can and massage her swollen belly until urine came pouring out. They’d dab her little butthole with warm cotton balls to make her poop, then rub ointment on the crusty tumor in her ear while she napped in their cradled palms. Sounds pretty cute, right? Well, fuck that. Every time I would get close enough to watch that little succubus stumble around her cage and search blindly for some unsuspecting food source to latch on to, she would sense my presence and stop cold, turning her thimble-size head and sightless eyes in my direction before emitting a tiny hiss.
The techs and assistants named her Helen Keller because of that gnarly tumor blocking her one ear and the third eyelids that remained permanently glued over her constantly watering eyes (and also because, at our core, most people are terrible. HELEN KELLER, DUDES?! Okay, fine, whatever). That smelly little chunk probably couldn’t hear and definitely couldn’t see, but that didn’t stop her from eating tunnels through bowls of soupy kitten slurry and taking huge (now unassisted) dumps in the makeshift litter box we fashioned out of cardboard. She still reeked of rotting garbage and had the personality of old shoes, but that little asshole just refused to die. The power of Satan or Xenu or some other diabolical deity grew stronger within her and she’d gain an ounce and an inch by the goddamned day.
One afternoon, as I was taking some samples to the lab, I tiptoed over to the cage where Helen was snoring softly atop a mound of pink towels and fluffy blankets. Just as I felt the ice around my heart begin to melt, she bolted upright out of a dead sleep, her head swiveling 180 degrees on an unmoving neck until her sightless eyes were on me and a low growl rumbled up from the pit of her distended belly. Horrified, I dropped the samples and backed slowly away from her cell, glass shattering as infected dog urine splashed on the moderately priced sensible footwear OSHA requires us to wear at all times in the hospital. I crossed myself and flicked holy water (I keep some in my pockets in case of emergency) as she levitated to the ceiling of the cage.
“I hate you,” I whispered.
“Bitch, I hate you, too!” she spat back.
—
“Is that horrible little thing dead yet?” I asked Ken a couple of weeks later. He had Helen on the treatment table, her slimy head cupped in one gloved hand as he carefully instilled drops into her eyes. “Actually, she’s thriving!” he observed, leaning down to peer through an otoscope into what were obviously ear-shaped devil horns. “Her eyes are open and appear to be fully functional.”
I strained to look over his shoulder at where she’d hunkered down next to a wad of cotton bigger than her body. I picked her up—she began squeaking and yowling in protest—and cradled her in the crook of my arm. Now that the milky-white membranes that had covered her eyes for weeks had retracted, she was finally starting to look like a real cat. As she gazed up at me, blinking her eyes into focus, the corner of her lip curled into a barely perceptible sneer. “I’m underwhelmed,” she sighed, visibly bored by my face. I waited for Ken to go get something from the pharmacy before squeezing her so tight her body went limp and her eyes widened in terror. “I know where they keep the euthanasia solution,” I whispered into the downy fur on top of her head. A technician walked by with a load of towels fresh from the dryer and smiled. “That’s so cute! You guys are bonding!”